It was advanced to me by a very decent chap, in fact; Derek Pringle, a former England all-rounder and now the highly respected cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.

We were talking during Pakistan's recent one-day match against Somerset in Taunton, and I asked why there remained several former players working in the media, still willing to grant them one last chance.

I said I would have expected them all to be, like Sir Ian Botham, on the point of apoplexy about Pakistan' s misdeeds from the start. Botham would have banished them long ago; so, it appears, would Michael Vaughan.

Pringle painted a picture that would be dreamily familiar to all romantics; of a country blessed with cricketers of extraordinary raw talent, untutored and untrammelled, capable of bringing unique excitement to the game, the way 18-year-old Mohammad Aamer did, briefly, this summer.

In a world in which promising cricketers are schooled and mentored almost from kindergarten, Pakistan represent the last bastion of pure and natural talent. Aamer may have been finished at an academy in Lahore, but until the age of 13 he had never even held a real cricket ball. His talent was unearthed while bowling with a version made from tightly rolled tape in the dust of the Punjab. Aamer's hero is Wasim Akram. Pringle said that, on his day, he had not seen a bowler able to do more with a ball than Akram, and that his team-mate Waqar Younis was not far behind.

It was a compelling appeal for clemency, evocative and impassioned, and nearly successful. Indeed, there are many shared enthusiasms on which I will bow to Derek's superior knowledge: obscure dub reggae 45s from the backstreets of Kingston, the boutique vineyards of Australia and New Zealand and, usually, cricket. But not this time. Sorry, mate, I don't care how good the individuals are. As an entity, Pakistan cricket is not worth it, not right now, not in its current state.

I saw Wasim and Waqar, and I was absolutely thrilled by Aamer on that fateful Friday at Lord's, but could I live without them if it meant being able to trust international cricket again? Reluctantly, yes.

To borrow a phrase from another sport, Pakistan have become the enemies of cricket. The executives of the PCB no longer care how much damage they do in the selfish attempts to shift the blame; they poison the well with baseless accusations, and then hide behind weasel words when challenged. It as if each administration attempts to outdo the last in notoriety.

Some think it a shame that Butt is allowed the oxygen of publicity to level his accusations against the England team. I am more mindful of the late Linda Smith's remark, when a similar statement was made about Jeffrey Archer. 'The oxygen of publicity?' she said. 'I'm not that happy with him having the oxygen of oxygen, actually.'

How bad is it? Well, the previous administration of former PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan is now being looked upon as some golden age of sanity and responsibility. This was the man in charge when Pakistan became the only team in the history of cricket to forfeit a Test match by walking off, so draw your own conclusions.

Compared to the crass, unsubstantiated falsehoods of Butt, Khan may be a smooth-talking charmer, but a brief return to his comments at the time of The Oval debacle in 2006, when Darrell Hair called a five-run penalty for ball tampering and Pakistan quit in protest, tell a different story.

'What a wonderful sight it is to see cricket between Pakistan, a Muslim country, and England, where the majority are Christian,' Khan simpered. 'Why destroy this over a technicality?' Aside from an outrageous attempt to introduce global politics into an already fractious moment, Khan played fast and loose with the most basic tenet of his sport. Those technicalities were something called the laws of cricket. The sort of insignificant twaddle that stops every match from the village green to the square at Lord's falling apart: you know, the umpire as sole arbiter of fair play, nonsense like that.

What Khan did on the day of the strike at The Oval was muddy the waters so that many otherwise sound judges, such as Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussain, were confused into thinking that the umpire, Hair, was the true villain of the piece. Butt attempted a similar diversionary tactic with his claim that bookmakers were saying Englandhad thrown the third one-day international.

Few beyond the most deluded conspiracy theorists believed this, but it was startling to hear a statement from Vaughan this week that he was 99.9 per cent certain England's players were straight. Vaughan, a former England captain, meant it as a positive and confident endorsement but in matters as serious as match-fixing, any doubt, however tiny, is the same as having no faith at all. Put it like this: if your partner proclaimed being 99.9 per cent faithful throughout your relationship, you couldn't help but be intrigued by the absent 0.1 per cent.

And this is what Pakistan, enemies of cricket, have achieved. They have placed a spot of uncertainty against all cricketers, not just those accused of bowling no balls to order. They have, for their own ends and without a shred of evidence, besmirched their sport and most specifically an England team that, led by Andrew Strauss, has largely conducted itself with dignity and professionalism in extraordinary circumstances. And no matter the richness of Pakistan's culture, or the thrill of Aamer's six Lord's wickets, these tourists are not worth that. There will be other great bowlers, other great talents, for aficionados like Pringle to revel in, and they will come without this gruesome baggage of corruption and slander.

On Wednesday, at the Rose Bowl in Southampton, Pakistan complete a cursed summer tour with what may well be their last international fixture in the foreseeable future, if reports from South Africa and New Zealandare to be believed. They will certainly not return to these shores next year and many are unconcerned whether they are seen again. Cricket will survive without them; and so will we. International sport will certainly be cleansed by the demise of its most negative force.

I am reminded - and not for the first time - of the opening of the poem The Death of Lord and Lady Dalhousie by the Scottish poet and noted nutcase, William Topaz McGonagall.

ALAS! Lord and Lady Dalhousie are dead, and buried at last,
Which causes many people to feel a little downcast.

But the numbers are dwindling by the day, Del.