A COLD SHOULDER ON AMIR’S COMEBACK

Long after he last played professional baseball, and longer still after he set a batting record for a rookie season, Shoeless Joe Jackson returned to the place he was born, South Carolina, and opened up a liquor store in Greenville. It was the last of the many ways to make a living he tried after he was banned from his first, true, calling, of playing pro ball. Among the others, Jackson ran a dry-cleaning business, a barbecue restaurant, and played and managed for a few different semi-pro sides. The job at the bottle shop was the one that stuck. And it was there that he met again his two old friends Ty Cobb and Grantland Rice.

Jackson was the best of the eight players banned from the game because they fixed the 1919 World Series, which the White Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds. “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” as the story goes. Cobb and Rice called in on him on their way back from watching the golf at Augusta National. They found Jackson straightening up the bottles on the shelf behind the counter. “How’s business?” Cobb said. “Just fine, sir,” Jackson replied. “Don’t you know who I am, you old buzzard?” Cobb asked. “Sure, I know you, Ty,” Jackson replied. “But I wasn’t sure you wanted to know me. A lot of them don’t.”

At least, that’s the way Rice told it. The line came to mind listening to Mohammad Hafeez this week. Hafeez has said that he turned down an offer of around £60,000 to play for the Chittagong Vikings in the Bangladesh Premier League because he didn’t want to share a dressing room with Mohammad Amir. It’s not the first time he has shunned his old team-mate. Earlier this year, so the reports go, he refused to share a net with him during a team training session. But it is the first time Hafeez has spoken about how he feels.

“I am not against any individuals,” Hafeez told Cricinfo. “It is about the image of Pakistan cricket. I cannot play with any player who has tarnished and brought a bad name to the country.” He added: “We play for the public and entertain them with a sporting spirit, and once someone abuses the role he has to play in the game … I cannot play and share a dressing room with such players who have abused the spirit of the game.” Kevin Pietersen makes similar remarks in his new book, On Cricket. “The game is bigger than us, the game will be around a lot longer than us, and we don’t have the right to steal from it.” If you get caught, Pietersen says, “you have to be given a life ban”.

Amir, still only 23 even after his four years out of the game following the spot-fixing scandal, made his comeback in March. He, and his advisors, had been planning it ever since he was banned. The very evening after the ICC announced his punishment, Amir gave a TV interview in which he promised the Pakistani public, at the interviewer’s behest, that he “would be back”. In his book, The Unquiet Ones, Osman Samiuddin recalls a conversation from around that same time, in which Amir spoke about how “he would plot his own campaign back into cricket, how his ban would be reduced and how two of the tribunal members had been so sympathetic and wanted to reduce his punishments but couldn’t”. Amir’s remorse in the years since has sometimes seemed a little like a media strategy, his rehabilitation stage-managed by his agents.

Since that first match, Amir has swept on towards his goal of regaining his place in the Pakistan team. Ten wickets for Rawalpindi in nine T20 matches, 34 for Sui Southern Gas Corporation in four qualifying matches for the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, 16 more in the first-class matches of the competition proper. Now he is playing outside of Pakistan again, in Bangladesh. A star player in a league relaunched after being suspended for a year, and still struggling to re-establish its own credibility after nine players were charged with being part of a spot-fixing conspiracy in 2013. It seems likely Amir will be back in the national team soon enough, perhaps in time for the World T20 early next year.

Many fans will be happy to see him. Amir was extended a measure of public sympathy denied to his fellow fixers, Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif, because of his youth, and the fact that he was, as Judge Jeremy Cooke said at the time, “unsophisticated, uneducated and impressionable”, and “readily leaned on by others”. Hafeez, however, isn’t having it. “They were just banned and went away from the fields,” he told a reporter from the Urdu newspaper Jang. “It was us who had to bear the brunt. We had to restore Pakistan team’s integrity, restore the confidence of the world.”

You can understand his anger, and he is not alone in it. During a match against PIA earlier this year, Amir was sledged by Faisal Iqbal, who called him a “thief”. Both men were fined. If the insult cut, remember too that, as Hafeez says: “We had to suffer the taunts of the fans and after 2010 every act, every defeat and every mistake of ours was seen as suspicious, so we overcame that tough time and will not allow it to happen again.” This at a time when the Pakistan team are under investigation, again, because of their defeat to in the third ODI against England, sparked by irregularities on the betting markets, but fuelled by rash remarks made by Michael Vaughan.

Sports fans love redemption stories. Amir’s may well turn out to be one of the greatest ever told. But don’t expect everyone to buy into it. Some of his fellow players would be happier if he went the way of Shoeless Joe, and slipped quietly back to the place he first came from.

• This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page, find ‘The Spin’ and follow the instructions.