The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) will continue to support the implementation of the Decision Review System (DRS) and is trying to have it employed for their one-day series against Australia in August.
A senior PCB official said that although the International Cricket Council (ICC) executive board decided against having mandatory use of the DRS but Pakistan continued to support the system.
ICC has left it to Boards to decide if they want to use DRS in a bilateral series. “We are trying to obtain sponsorship to use the DRS against Australia in the one-dayers as we feel it is a system that has helped the game and umpires,” PCB chief operating officer Subhan Ahmed said.
Pakistan suffered during the first Test against Sri Lanka at Galle due to some contentious decisions by umpires Steve Davis and Ian Gould as the Sri Lankan board has deciding against having the DRS in the ongoing home series.
“We had the DRS for our home series against Sri Lanka that was played last year in UAE because we obtained sponsorship but we can understand there are high costs involved in using this technology,” Ahmed said.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has been the biggest opponent of making the DRS use mandatory in international cricket and managed to put off a ICC move to make it mandatory at the board meetings held in Kuala Lumpur late last month.
Ahmed, who attended the ICC chief executives meeting in Kuala Lumpur which recommended mandatory use of the DRS, said Pakistani players had positive views about having the DRS in one-dayers and Tests.
“As far as India is concerned they have their views on the DRS,” he added.
Commenting on the ICC decision to encourage day-night Test matches, Ahmed said Pakistan was the only country to have officially twice staged the final of its premier domestic first class competition (Quaid-e-Azam trophy) as day-night encounters for last two years.
“We had day-night finals and the experiment was pretty successful. But at the international we do feel that day and night Test matches should first be experimented with in series between weaker nations before they can be tried in bigger matches,” he said. Ahmed said so far Cricket South Africa which will host Pakistan for a test series early next year had not spoken about any possibility of experimenting with a day and night test in that series.. “We think it would be too early,” he added.
