Sir Paul Condon, in the Daily Telegraph, says the ICC should also consider punishing national boards if their players have been found guilty of being involved in corruption.

So what is the best way forward? The ICC must have the courage to support its current anti-corruption infrastructure. More resources may be necessary to monitor the growing volume of matches and tournaments. The ICC must insist and ensure that every national board, team management and tournament organiser has accredited measures to prevent and detect malpractice.

In future, if cricketers are found guilty of corruption, consideration should be given to punishing national boards and if possible tournament organisers, if they have been negligent with regard to the guilty behaviour.

In the National, Osman Samiuddin says the ICC's Anti-Corruption and Security Unit has done more than its critics think to curb corruption in cricket, and needs our trust.

James Lawton, in the Independent, says that while member boards or the ICC may not have done enough to eradicate corruption in cricket, the sport should have someone to meet Mohammad Amir and tell him he can still make use of his gifts upon his release.

Former England captain Michael Vaughan remains at the head of those unimpressed by the decision of the ICC to ban Amir for a mere five years. Vaughan says there should be no quarter, that Amir has forfeited the right to play the game for which he was so superbly endowed. He speaks, persuasively enough, of the need for a deterrent.

Yet the value of a deterrent has always been in direct proportion to the means of enforcement and how does that sit with the feeble record of the International Cricket Council's anti-corruption unit in the Pakistan affair?

The same paper carries a report on the "demeaning conditions" at Wandsworth Prison, where three of the accused could be in for a tough time.

In the Express Tribune, Imran Yusuf writes that the lack of apology from the PCB after this scandal shows that the game is being run by people who don't really understand the meaning of sport.

We are made mugs for getting up in the middle of the night, lunatics for investing deep emotional attachment, and fools for arguing with friends in deadly comic earnestness our take on a team’s strategies.

Paul Kelso, writing in the Daily Telegraph, says the convictions of the three Pakistan cricketers are a hollow victory in the battle against corruption in the game.

In the Daily Mail, Paul Newman says cricket has reached its tipping point vis-a-vis corruption and now has an ideal opportunity to eliminate fixing.

In his column in the Daily Mail, Nasser Hussain wonders if he'd played a match during his career that may have been dodgy.

An editorial in the Guardian hails the investigations into the spot-fixing scandal as a major breakthrough, and calls for greater powers for the ICC to tackle corruption.

Agents and players may been sentenced in this case but the bigger criminals are still at large, says Richard Williams in the same newspaper.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Roebuck writes: "Never forget that at the time of his criminal activities Salman Butt was captaining his country. Never forget that he was at the pinnacle of his career and at the top of a huge cricket community in a nation of 180 million people. Never forget that cricket is one of the few consolations available to the poor of that nation. Never forget that Pakistan is a troubled country with a fractured history, and that cricket is its national game. The scale of the betrayal is numbing."

How much money do people want? It is a question that can just as easily be put to dictators with their billions, bankrupt bankers awarding themselves fat bonuses, politicians rorting the system, squillionaires avoiding tax and the rest of the fallen. Sportsmen do not exist in isolation, are not God's special creations. They are corrupt because the world is corrupt.

"Three cricketers have been pursued for corruption. They have not only been banned from the game, they now face time in jail. As deterrents go, there cannot be a more daunting one for future cricketers who may be tempted," writes Osman Samiuddin in the National.

And for the three individuals, is there sadness that they are lost? There was when the scandal first broke and there was when they were then banned from the game, particularly at losing bowlers as gifted as Amir and Asif. Their careers had already been broken by the time of the trial.

But now their lives stand to be, which evokes an altogether different, indescribable emotion. It can only be captured by the news of the birth of Butt's second child, a boy, born about an hour before the verdict was delivered; a life created just as one responsible for it was all but finished.

Scyld Berry in the Daily Telegraph: It is thought that, when Mr Justice Cooke passes sentence on the three Pakistan players towards the end of this week, Amir might escape a prison sentence on the grounds that he pleaded guilty; and his youth - he was officially 18 at the time he bowled two deliberate no-balls in the Lord’s Test last year - will also be taken into account. But the stigma will remain: Mohammad Amir fixed. And maybe the cricket world should not feel compassionate towards him but, rather, that the ban and the sentence to come are right.

"An easy quid begins to look a whole lot less easy when a sportsman stands to go to jail for it," writes Greg Baum in the WA Today. Sportsmen frequently are called hardened, but not in the sense of criminals, who factor the risk of incarceration into their dealings.

In the Guardian, Vic Marks says: The trio's guilt comes as no surprise to former players. Indeed, a "not guilty" verdict from Southwark would have been far more depressing for the game. A simple photo from that Lord's Test match of August 2010 was as eloquent as any barrister's summing up.

There was Pakistan's captain, Butt, at mid-off as his bowler entered his delivery stride. Any cricketer knows that a mid-off fieldsman would be focusing on the batsman at this moment, in anticipation of the ball being hit in his direction. Where was Butt looking? At his bowler's feet, checking, presumably, that he would indeed bowl a no-ball, as had been agreed with the News of the World's "fake sheikh", Mazher Mahmood.

"Maybe Amir, dazzled by the quick money which his father and brothers could not expect to earn in their lifetimes, would have fallen in almost any circumstances. He could have said no, but with what encouragement, what support, what suggestion that he had another choice?" asks James Lawton in the Independent. "These are the questions that must haunt the cricket authorities, particularly as represented by the Pakistani cricket board and the International Cricket Council's anti-corruption unit."

Also in the Independent, Stephen Brenkley revisits the day the spot-fixing scandal broke.

Insufficient. Harsh. Inevitable. The spot-fixing verdict has elicited all sorts of reactions around the cricketing world. Scyld Berry of the Telegraph takes a look at the three talents that have been lost, for at least the next five years.

Try standing still and, in one hand, flicking a cricket ball 180 degrees. Asif could do that when running in, in his delivery stride, an astonishing sleight of hand that only a handful of pace bowlers — at most — have mastered. The purpose is to reveal to the batsman the ball’s shiny side, then to deceive him by flicking the seam over.

By the end of the series against England, after six Tests in two months, Asif was fading — and we now know he had other things on his mind at Lord’s.

In the same paper, Berry goes on to analyse the verdict itself, and concludes that the sanctions aren't a strong enough deterrant for pontential future transgressors and, more importantly, undetected culprits still playing the game.

There is so much smoke — rumours of spot- and match-fixing — circulating in world cricket that it is very unlikely there is no fire. And those already engaged are going to look at the sentences dished out in Doha and work out that the reprisals they will face from the underworld for ceasing to match-fix are far worse than a five-year ban.

Given Mohammad Amir's age and background, the tribunal should have not come down so hard on him, writes James Lawton in the Independent. He says, the officials who allowed Amir to be corrupted thus should have been the ones taking the rap.

The ICC put three cricketers in the dock but you have to ask the whereabouts of the people who were in charge of Amir's well-being, the Pakistani officials who left their team quarters open to the forays of a man charged with setting up irrefutable evidence that he could, for an agreed fee, engineer corrupt behaviour on the field? No one was saying that if proven guilty Amir should escape any form of punishment, only that there should be an understanding of his quite grotesquely vulnerable position.

Robert Craddock in the Courier-Mail wonders, in the aftermath of the Pakistan trio being handed bans ranging from five to ten years, what a player would have to do to earn a life ban.

Would you have to perform a Hannibal Lecter and eat a rival's liver with "fava beans and a nice chianti"? Hannibal would have been an even-money chance of getting a suspended sentence (perhaps losing 10 per cent of his match fee) had he been put on trial by the International Cricket Council.

Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald argues that a sense of proportion needs to be retained.

The response to the infractions of sportsmen is out of proportion and smacks of hypocrisy. It's as if sport was treated as a separate world, a legendary place populated by heroes and villains. In fact it is merely part of the wider world.

And in the Australian, Malcolm Conn wonders why it took a tabloid newspaper to uncover the scandal when the ICC has its own anti-corruption body.

A strong and decisive punishment was vital against players so obviously guilty of corruption. Anything less would have completely gutted an already grubby and poorly administered game made more vulnerable by the riches of the IPL. Are the ICC and its organs capable of protecting it? The answer appears to be, without the News of The World, no.

Sriram Dayanand writes in Yahoo about the impact the latest scandal is having on cricket's youngest generation - players and followers alike.

Watching him walk back to the pavilion after being put out of his misery by Swann on the last day, amidst eerie silence at Lord's, was agonizing. The grim face behind that visor was matched by that of the glum eleven year old sitting beside me watching. In that juxtaposition of the two sad faces lay the tragedy of cricket's loss. Our game's newest generations just got tainted for life.

Before the sting that allegedly exposed three Pakistan players for spot-fixing, the News of the World carried out a sting on then world snooker champion John Higgins that appeared to catch him accepting money to fix the results of specific frames. Snooker’s governing body, however, found Higgins innocent. The case makes clear the dangers of trial-by-media. Innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental principle of justice. Passing judgement on the three Pakistan players in the eye of the spot-fixing scandal is therefore best left until all investigations are complete, writes Jonathan Howcroft in the Back Page Lead

It is clear that both snooker and cricket (and presumably all other sports at some level) have problems with spot-fixing and match-fixing. If there was no problem, neither of the News of the World’s stings could have been executed to such an extent. However, if the purpose of these investigations is to uphold sporting integrity, judgement should be left until the allegations have been conclusively proven. The line between an investigation in the public interest and circulation-boosting entrapment is fine and the Higgins case shows how damaging it can be if the public is cast as judge and jury before time.

Let us hope ongoing and future allegations of sporting misdemeanours can be judged soberly by those professionally charged with doing so. If these are brought to light by investigative journalism, praise should be lavished on the investigation at the conclusion of a fair trial. Until then, however shameful the circumstantial evidence and sensational headlines appear, the presumption of innocence deserves to rule.

Variety betting is extremely big business and no sport offers a greater range of options in that particular field than cricket, whether it be the number of runs scored in a session or how many chocolate cakes will be delivered to the BBC commentary box before lunch on the first day of the Lord’s Test match, writes Martin Johnson in the Sunday Times.

More disturbing for the sport, with a county cricketer recently reporting an approach from an Indian businessman worth a moral-compass tempting £5m, is that all the evidence points to large sums of money now being offered to players in the lower echelons of the game, players who are therefore more likely to be enticed. Limited-over games between English county sides are televised live in India, where vast sums of money are involved in betting on cricket. Hard though it is to conjure up the picture, a humdrum Pro40 match in front of a handful of cloth caps in Derby might have millions of dollars resting on the outcome in Delhi.

In the Sunday Telegraph, Steve James urges the authorities to be vigilant and says "itis vital now that these players remain anonymous, as must those who came forward last week. Whistle-blowing can be a dangerous and stressful business, especially where the murky Indian underworld is concerned."

The match-fixing scandal at the turn of the decade led to the downfall of Hansie Cronje and Mohammad Azharuddin, among others, and brought home to officials and the public just how big the issue was. Over the past few years it has almost disappeared from the agenda - but hasn't gone away, Peter Roebuck writes in the Sydney Morning Herald. The game, especially the Twenty20 format, is once again in danger of being overrun by bookies and match-fixing, he says.

But 20-over cricket has lured them from their hideaways. Conversations with Indian Cricket League players confirm that the bookmakers are running amok in the rebel league, and it'd be the height of folly to assume that the Indian Premier League has remained intact. These players talk about strange events in matches, and one thinks he played in a match both sides were trying to lose. Others speak about batsmen suddenly playing out a maiden or padding up to a spinner, an odd technique to use in a 20-over contest.

	There has only been one story in the cricket this week © AFP

The Sunday broadsheets continue to try and make sense of Bob Woolmer's murder. In The Independent on Sunday, Nick Townsend says that the game Woolmer loved so much has been pushed firmly into the background. He also extends the theory that perhaps Woolmer knew too much about the darker side of the game.

From a World Cup of tantalising possibilities, it has become a Cup of Woe. Rather like the feeling of emptiness and despair which overcame us when the 1985 European Cup final proceeded while the bodies were still being removed at the Heysel Stadium, does anyone really care about the cricket?

Also in the Independent on Sunday, Stephen Brenkley gives a very personal tribute to Woolmer.

But his greatest virtue had nothing to do with his cricketing prowess. It was that he had time for everybody. There was no side to Bobby. In the high-pressure world of big-time cricket, he did not seal himself in a bubble. He wanted to embrace the whole world.

A common theme is also that Woolmer should have been England coach, probably back in 1999 when David Lloyd took over, and, even at the age of 58, would have commanded an interview to take over from Duncan Fletcher. Simon Wilde, in The Sunday Times, looks at Woolmer the coach

Meanwhile, in the Sunday Telegraph Mike Atherton insists the ICC can no longer decide the game’s future with the focus solely on money.

There is no suggestion that Woolmer's murder has anything to do with corruption. Even so, it is time for the administrators of the game to take note; time to put the game's long-term interests first, rather than the need to make decisions with purely money in mind, no matter what the consequences.

Just ask yourself why we have seen so many mis-matches in the opening week of the tournament and why there are more teams, 16, than ever before, even though some of them would struggle to beat a good London club side. With Ireland and Bangladesh going through to the second stage of the tournament, the ICC should be careful what they wish for.

The the same paper, Lord MacLaurin, the former chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, has called for a major review of the ICC.