ALL is not well at the Pakistan Cricket Board. The PCB’s workings have never been a byword for stability but the flux seen these days is remarkable even by the board’s standards.
Within a space of three months, two senior members of the PCB set-up have resigned while another has been sacked. Outspoken chief selector Abdul Qadir was the first to quit, citing ‘unacceptable’ interference in selection matters. The second resignation came from National Cricket Academy director and former captain Aamer Sohail. It is believed the PCB chairman’s apparent failure to give him a free hand in running the academy and starting new development programmes convinced Mr Sohail that it was time to go.
Meanwhile, reports of chief operating officer Saleem Altaf’s increasingly tense relationship with chairman Ijaz Butt had been doing the rounds for quite some time. He was dismissed a week ago.
Ijaz Butt, who has also been in slanging matches with the Senate’s standing committee on sports, is the central figure in this sorry saga. His attitude towards the media has occasionally bordered on hostility and he is not averse either to making inconsistent statements.
It doesn’t end there. In the aftermath of the attack on the Sri Lankan team, Mr Butt lashed out at match referee Chris Broad who had claimed that security for players and officials was lax in Lahore. Resorting to language unbecoming, he called Broad a liar even though the massive security lapse was apparent to all and was subsequently accepted by Pakistani officials.
Mr Butt may have also botched Pakistan’s chances of holding its World Cup matches at neutral venues. He allegedly became stroppy with the ICC and alienated the other co-hosts by demanding that the whole tournament be moved out of the subcontinent. Pakistan cricket needs stability in these testing times and Ijaz Butt is not the man to provide it. He must be shown the door.
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