LONDON — For many Pakistanis, weighed down by their country’s descent into biblical levels of violence and flooding, there was a sense of a final straw in the crude betting scandal that broke over the weekend around the Pakistani cricket team, whose players have long been idols with feet of clay in a nation with few exemplars elsewhere to sustain fragile pride.

Even as the Pakistani team faced humiliating defeat by England in a game played on the hallowed grasses of Lord’s ground in London, traditionally regarded as the home of cricket, Scotland Yard detectives interrogated three of the team’s key players — including the captain and an 18-year-old novice who has been the team’s star performer in its series with England — in their hotel on Saturday night.

The detectives told team managers that they had been tipped to a “spot fixing” scandal that was about to be splashed across the front page of Sunday’s News of the World, Britain’s most widely circulated tabloid.

Spot-fixing refers to a form of corruption that has plagued cricket, soccer and other sports in Europe, particularly Britain, the former colonial power in what is now Pakistan. Instead of bribing players to fix matches outright, considered too risky for the Asian betting syndicates involved, the schemes often rely on fixing details of play that — while not necessarily affecting a game’s outcome — can attract millions of dollars of bets across Asia.