After hearing a lot of fuss about fake degrees of the assembly members, bogus votes in the last elections, the latest scandal is about the different stories of recent semi-final match of the Cricket World Cup between India and Pakistan at Mohali, India. There are many stories about this, like bookies who bought the Pakistani players, people involved in the cricket diplomacy, giving the match to India for the sake of good relations and resumption of stalled composite dialogue between the two countries, telephone calls between our team captain and Home Minister Rehman Malik, PM ringing up Shahid Afridi and many more.
Many TV talk shows were held for the post-mortem of the match by our past and present cricket heroes. They criticised the Pakistan team objectively but the team captain and the team officials were defending the team performance. The captain, Shahid Afridi, apologised from the nation for committing mistakes and thus losing the match. He had no answers to some critical questions like not taking power play at the right time or changing the attack bowler when he was being thrashed or changing the batting order or Misbah’s slow game etc.
Whatever the case is, all cricket lovers feel that it was a fake encounter where a lot of money and diplomacy was involved. Even Indian media has many doubts on the match and has published many questions on the match. But our government and the PCB are very happy about the performance of the team. They have given receptions and monetary awards.
MUHAMMAD AZHAR KHWAJA
Lahore