Close on the heels of the much publicised ‘Tiger hunt’ to nab former cricket captain Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi for poaching, was the revelation of the close links that Pakistani cricketer Javed Maindad enjoys with the underworld.

Make no mistake it isn’t the subcontinent alone that is prone to such illicit activities off the field. If anything, sportsmen abroad provide a far juicier source to sell tabloids by the dozens. For every squeaky clean Michael Owen that the England soccer team can boast of, there will always be a colourful David Beckham playing the field, in the literal sense.

Most recently the Football Association of England provided ample fodder to the tabloid press when former FA secretary, the Bangladeshi-born Faria Alam went public with allegations of sexual harassment by a top FA official. According to her, he tried to force himself onto her in a hotel room and every time they were alone in an elevator, he would try to kiss her.

The sultry Faria Alam is no stranger to this arena of unsporting encounters, if one can call them that. She was earlier caught in the eye of a torrid scandal when the press exposed her affairs with England’s Swedish coach Sven Goran Eriksson (whom she affectionately referred to as Sugar) and a member of FA’s top brass. Consequently she was forced to resign and Eriksson came very close to losing his job.

But English football has its bad boy in the flamboyant captain of the national squad David Beckham. After widely publicised fallouts with his former boss Alex Ferguson in his days at Manchester United, he made the move to Spain with Real Madrid, leaving his pop star wife Victoria, aka Posh Spice and two young sons behind in England. A couple of months later, his former personal assistant at the Spanish club, Rebecca Loos spilled the beans to the media that she had enjoyed an affair with him, leaking out spicy details of their intimate encounters.

Among her revelations she is famously supposed to have stated , “I looked down and there was David Beckham. David Beckham!” The frenzy that followed threatened to wreck Beckham’s marriage which barely weathered the storm.

Down Under cricketer Shane Warne displayed a penchant on more than one occasion of making arduous moves on reluctant women, one of whom was at the receiving end of a flurry of explicit text messages.

Closer home, tennis player Leander Paes was linked to the married Rhea Pillai, wife of Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt no less. The much maligned captain of the Indian cricket team Sourav Ganguly set tongues aflutter and gossip writers in frenetic activity, with rumours of romantic dalliance with Bollywood actress Nagma.

Even more scandalous was the fate of the Pakistan cricket team when during a tour of Australia, there were reports of a woman claiming to have been raped by a Pakistani cricketer in his hotel room. Amid much speculation about the identity of the offender, matters finally died down with the alleged victim withdrawing her complaint.

In the track and field events, doping continues to fire up imagination roping in some of the most visible names. Marion Jones and her boyfriend Tim Montgomery are perhaps the most prominent among them all even though neither has yet been formally charged with the offence. Back home, Sunita Rani was dragged to hell and back over a failed dope test before she was finally cleared but not before she had made the headlines on every newspaper in the country.

And so the world of sport continues to make news for all the wrong reasons with unsporting behaviour and unsportsman-like conduct. Perhaps the basic explanation may lie in the fact that sportsmen are doomed to become a spectacle to the public eye whether on the field or off it.