Pakistan Match Fixing Ad in New Zealand in Poor Taste; Daryl Tuffey Defends

Daryl Tuffey The New Zealand bowler is promoting a brewery company that using the Pakistan match fixing scandal

 

One has to wonder about the logic behind the Auckland’s brewery to not only use Daryl Tuffey as their brand ambassador but also, to then align his image with the Pakistan match fixing scandal when New Zealand is preparing for the Rugby World Cup that gets underway later this week.


An Auckland brewery was forced to withdraw its ad and rightly so for putting the face of New Zealand fast bowler, Daryl Tuffey, with the background of the spot fixing scandal that hit Pakistan cricket last year on their tour of England. The Moa Brewery Co. was forced to withdraw its backhander campaign after its marketing shot was rendered in poor taste.

Although Tuffey refuses to see anything wrong with the ad campaign and even refers to Pakistan as a breeding ground for match fixing, albeit in different words, it is rather astonishing that those words are coming from a Test cricketer no less who should be an ambassador for cricket before using an ugly episode from cricket to promote a brand. However, Tuffey seems to not be bothered by the backlash off the field or on it for the words used in the campaign such as :

Pakistanis love cricket and they love making money. Sometimes they combine the two with a good old Pakistani Match Fix…

Perhaps the brewery was short on creativity or perhaps Tuffey’s own cricket exploits were not good enough to promote that they had to resort to stooping so low as to associate the image of their brand with an episode none in the cricket world want to recall. That Tuffey would think that knowledge in Pakistan about the ad would mean promotion for the brewery stinks, quite literally because New Zealand cricket would be the last one to throw stones given that they are a long way away from being reckoned as the strongest current competitors in the game. perhaps focusing on their own cricket or even using the Rugby World Cup as the backdrop would have served their interests. However, if they were look for cheap publicity, unless they are of the type to view even negative publicity as good publicity, it is likely that people will be lining up for their offers of free packages rather than being enticed by their exploitation of a cricket incident no cricketer – of any nationality – should not want to reiterate, and even more dangerously, a stereotype of perception at that.

It is hard to imagine that an obscure brewery would think that using the image of the scandal that rocked the cricket world in order to prop up its image and one would wonder why anyone in the business world would want to associate themselves with an incident that was unethical, shunned and punished by the rest of the world.

The spot fixing scandal was a real low point in cricket history’s coming as it did ten years since match fixing rocked the cricket world in 2000. It threw the Pakistan tour of England off its feet and took several by surprise as the now defunct News of the World ran a sting operation that saw how no balls were fixed . The ICC eventually punished three Pakistan cricketers – Mohammad Asif, Mohammad Aamer, and Salman Butt with varying bans from international cricket. For Pakistan cricket, it was a huge blow on several levels and that it would be exploited in the manner in which by the Auckland brewery says a lot about the brewery and hopefully their free package of beer will taste better than their marketing campaign.