Rajat Sharma’s Blog | Pakistan’s U-turn on T-20: Fools come back home

Pakistan Cricket Board made a U-turn, decided to play the T20 World Cup group match against India in Colombo on Sunday. Late on Monday night, the Pakistan government issued a statement giving permission to its cricket board to play the match against India. The statement said that “after talks with many countries and requests from friendly countries, the Government of Pakistan directs its cricket team to play the match against India in Colombo on 15 February.” On Monday, Sri Lankan President Anura Kumar Dissanayake had called Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif and requested him to resolve the impasse by directing him to play the match against India. After the directive was issued, Disshanayake congratulated Shehbaz Sharif on social media.

In his message the Sri Lankan President said that Sri Lanka cannot forget the 1996 World Cup when India and Pakistan played the match despite security concerns in Sri Lanka. Former captain Sourav Ganguly said that the India-Pakistan match will be very important, but it will not be easy for Pakistan to defeat India. Ganguly said that his favorite players in Team India are Abhishek Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah, Suryakumar Yadav and Ishan Kishan. To convince Pakistan, ICC Vice President Imran Khawaja went to Lahore and had a long conversation with Pakistan Cricket Board Chief Mohsin Naqvi. Pakistan had to do a U-turn because if it had not played this match against India, it would have lost match points. An even bigger shock was that Pakistan would have had to face a fine for not playing the match.

The old cricketers of Pakistan were also demanding from their board that the PCB and the government of Pakistan should withdraw the decision of boycotting the match with India. Actually, Pakistan did not want to show that it was agreeing to play the match out of fear from ICC or under someone’s pressure. To save its face, PCB placed three demands before ICC. One, Bangladesh should be compensated, two, bilateral or trilateral series should be started with India and three, the money the Pakistan board receives from ICC should be increased. According to the information I have, ICC rejected all the demands of Pakistan.

Actually, Pakistan Cricket Board had announced boycott of the match with India in support of Bangladesh. For this, recourse was taken to ICC’s mutual participating agreement clause, according to which, any cricket board can refuse to play any match due to force majeure i.e. due to some sudden incident or on the orders of its government. PCB had refused to play the match with India using this clause, after which ICC Vice President reached Lahore to convince the President of Pakistan Cricket Board. Pakistan also called Bangladesh Cricket Board Chief Aminul Islam to Lahore.

A meeting was held between ICC, PCB and Bangladesh Cricket Board officials at Gaddafi Stadium. In this, the Chief of Bangladesh Cricket Board asked Pakistan to withdraw its decision to boycott India because Bangladesh is satisfied with the fact that PCB supported it morally, there is no need to escalate the matter now. Apart from ICC, Sri Lanka Cricket Board and Emirates Cricket Board also put pressure on PCB. Sri Lankan Cricket Board reminded PCB of its favor, saying that when no country was ready to go to Pakistan, then Sri Lanka had sent its team. Therefore, now the Pakistan Cricket Board should also return the favor and help Sri Lanka, the joint host of the T20 World Cup.

Since the matter was worth billions of dollars, the income from broadcast rights to ad revenue is in billions of dollars, hence Sri Lanka and UAE said that if Pakistan does not play with India then everyone will suffer loss. Actually, Pakistan’s decision of not playing India in the World Cup was political, an excuse was made for it. If the action was taken against Bangladesh, then why did Pakistan get hurt? Both UAE and Sri Lanka put pressure on Pakistan. If Pakistan had refused to play the match, it would have had to pay a fine of Rs 2300 crore, which Pakistan was not able to pay, that is why Pakistan changed the decision at the last moment. There is a saying, ‘The fools return home’. (Rajat Sharma)

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