Leave cricket to cricketers
Finally, Najam Sethi finds the good sense to disassociate himself from the ICC presidency. For one thing, he would have felt out of place, especially as president, owing to his lack of knowledge of the sport when compared to heads of other Boards. The right type of associations can land people at fascinating posts inside the country, but the outside world is more professional. Plus the assignment would have kept him away from a whole host of matters that he tends to closer to home. So at the end of the day the decision works out nicely for Sethi, but what exactly is the future of the PCB?
Significantly, it’s not as if Mr Sethi did not do his fair share of damage to Pakistani cricket. He may have eventually won the embarrassing musical chairs with Zaka Ashraf, but the damage done to national cricket is, perhaps, still being calculated. It is little surprise that such unprofessional handling of the Board coincided with unprecedented embarrassment for the national outfit, which was not only taken to the cleaners by minnows Bangladesh recently, but now have also sunk lower than them in the one day ratings.
Surely the mess in the Board must also be set right now. The present chairman is a good case in point. His faculties would not have come into question if his first stint had been something to write home about. Yet the prime minister, after taking over the Board’s patronage, saw fit to appoint him after the Sethi-Ashraf disaster, which shows what kind of importance the country’s leadership associates with the Board. This can rightly be described as the make-or-break moment for Pakistani cricket. There has been some – no matter how limited – show of responsibility form within the team. And we are open to international competition again. If only those in charge would let cricketers handle cricket, perhaps we might still claw our way out of the quagmire Sethi and his association left us .