ISLAMABAD: The federal cabinet on Friday approved new constitution of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) with regional cricket being focus of the new structuring plan for domestic circuit.

The federal cabinet, which met here with Prime Minister Imran Khan in the chair, approved the restructuring of domestic cricket set-up.

“[Finally] after 40 years, restructuring of cricket is done. Now, the focus will be on promoting regional cricket,” Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Information and Broadcasting Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan said after the cabinet meeting. “The cabinet [in the new domestic structure] has decided to promote regional cricket.”

She added, “It was also decided that special focus will also be on blind and women cricket. The meeting also decided that there is no need to promote veterans cricket rather resources will be spent on youth.”

Sources said that according to the new constitution of the PCB, the powers of chairman and chief executive have been separated.

According to the restructuring plan, there will be six regional teams on the domestic circuit — two teams of Punjab, and one each from Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federal Areas cricket associations — thus ending the current domestic cricket set-up comprising 16 regional bodies.

On domestic circuit, from U-16 to first-class cricket, six teams will be representing their respective provinces.

However, the associations at city level will continue to work to feed their players to the provincial teams and to play ‘B’ grade cricket. They said that in the new constitution, presidents of three cricket associations will be part of PCB Board of Governors. While, two members will be appointed by the prime minister, who will act as the patron-in-chief of the PCB. One woman will also be part of the PCB besides four independent directors.

It is relevant to note here that PM Imran Khan has long been showing his desire to bring structural improvement in the PCB to promote regional cricket.

Earlier in April this year when the matter was presented before the PCB Board of Governors, the cricket board faced setback when majority of the BoG members opposed the idea of abolishing departmental teams in domestic cricket. However, later the PCB on the directions of the PM prepared proposals for making changes in the PCB constitution which was approved on Friday.

Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2019