International Cricket Council (ICC) Chief Executive Haroon Lorgat and the Pakistan Task Team (PTT) members are expected to visit Pakistan in the near future. According to Cricinfo, although the nature of the trip and its timing has not yet been finalized, the visit is certain.
The Pakistan cricket Board (PCB) in its observation of the PTT recommendations showed its concern that it’s a scholarly report based on factual errors.
Cricinfo further stated that the PCB criticism stung the ICC though officials insist that the visit is not a direct consequence of that and had been on the cards for some time. The website further informs that it’s not clear as who would be part of the visiting party the ICC chief executive will be a likely visitor. The agenda is also not yet known. But it is difficult to imagine that some discussion on the broadest recommendations of the report – on the politicised nature of PCB governance and the system of appointment of the board chairman by the patron, the country’s president – will not form part of it, the website added.
There are also chances of the delegates meeting the top officials of the government to depoliticize the PCB while matters of security concern would also be part of the meeting to revive international cricket in Pakistan, the issue which has been given little space in the PTT report, the website added.
Cricinfo further stated that the development has emerged at a time of growing divergence between the PCB and the ICC over the 38-page report, which made 63 recommendations for what, in effect, amounts to a re-haul of the game and its governance in Pakistan. That the Pakistan board was not particularly taken in by the report was evident in their long and detailed public response – made earlier this week. The board said the report was a “scholarly exercise” and took a dig at the fact that nobody other than Dave Richardson, the ICC’s general manager and a PTT member, had come to Pakistan. It also said the report contained factual errors and that a number of recommendations were “superfluous or redundant.”
The prospect of ICC officials visiting Pakistan had been discussed earlier in meetings between the two bodies on the issue of the ICC governance-clause amendment, which calls for political interference in cricket boards to end, effectively by 2013. Dave Richardson was the only PTT official who visited Karachi for a short duration of time. It was on the political interference amendment issue against which the PCB sent the ICC a legal notice in May, ahead of the ICC annual conference; along with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, as the PCB is one of the boards most affected by the change, the website added.
The report further stated that the two sides agreed in earlier meetings to extend the deadline given to boards to implement the changes and the ICC expressed its willingness to visit Pakistan and discuss the changes with President Asif Ali Zardari. The clause was voted in at the annual conference without any objection from any board, though incidentally, the legal notice has not been withdrawn and lies inactive currently.
In his defence of the report, Lorgat said that the PCB’s chief operating officer Subhan Ahmed had been given the report “more than a week prior to the ICC executive board meeting in Hong Kong [in the last week of June] … and provided only minor observations which were incorporated into the final report.”
The PCB disputes this version. Though officials agree that the report was given to Ahmed, they claim it was understood at that stage that any observations would be informal and preliminary; in fact they claim that only Ahmed was allowed to see the report and was given less than 24 hours to comment on it. “This is something the chairman needs to see and give feedback on as well as the board of governors and not just one person,” Cricinfo quoted a board official. The ICC denies this was the case. In any case, some broad observations were given to the ICC and, by the time officials flew out to Hong Kong, incorporated in the report. The report was officially presented at the annual conference in June. At the time, PCB officials said they would respond to it with their own observations. Cricinfo understands that the PCB asked the ICC “to not put the report up on the website as the board was going to prepare their observations.”
That it was published before formal observations were given has upset the PCB. An ICC official said that the report had been released online because “in the interests of transparency we publish all reports.” A senior Pakistani official insisted that the issue wasn’t the publication of the report. “We feel they should’ve done it once we had officially submitted our observations. Now they say we have discredited the report with our observations.”
As a fall-out of this episode, believes the PCB, the ICC has tried to limit further damage and indicated their willingness to send the PTT to Pakistan in the near future, the website added.
