Pakistan Cricket Board chief patron, President Asif Ali Zardari, has given PCB Chairman Ijaz Butt time until October this year to put the house in order and retire from the post. Reports coming from the board said that the search for a suitable person for the post of Chairman PCB has been started and Butt will hand over the office to that person before retiring from his post in October.
The PCB has started considering suitable people for the post. It has also been reported that former PCB ad-hoc committee chairman Dr Zafar Altaf and ex-Chief Executive Officer Arif Ali Khan Abbasi have been nominated for the post. Arif Ali Khan Abbasi remained the PCB chief for two years from January 1994 to May 1996, whereas Dr Altaf worked for two months in the board as the ad-hoc committee chairman from October 1999. Ijaz Butt, a former cricketer, has been the chairman of PCB for two years now, since October 2008. His contract was extended for another year, and will expire in October. Butt has been involved in various controversies during his career. One of the major incident for which he had to face massive criticism was in 2009, when the PCB failed to provide suitable security to the Sri Lankan cricket team. The Sri Lankan squad faced a terror attack in Lahore, when armed gunmen attacked their bus and many players were injured. Following the attack, Pakistan was stripped of several international series to be held in the country and the team instead had to rely on neutral grounds to play their home matches. Butt also famously accused the Poms of match-fixing during Pakistan’s tour of England in 2010. Butt later withdrew his comments after he came under fire from the British media for making baseless statements against their players. The former cricketer was appointed as the chairman of the PCB by the President Asif Ali Zardari, who is also the Patron in Chief of the Board. The PCB management is now looking forward to find a suitable person for the post and they also want to make sure that no controversies take place in the future.
