LAHORE: No unconstitutional or illegal practices are being adopted in running the Pakistan Cricket Board’s (PCB) affairs and the International Cricket Council (ICC) does not believe that the government of Pakistan has any objectionable interference in the board’s affairs, either in electing the PCB chairman or approving its new constitution of 2019.

This was stated by PCB’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Salman Naseer during an exclusive talk with Dawn on Wednesday while answering queries regarding the implementation of the Board’s new constitution.

“Some people are critics of the PCB alleging that the PCB is running in unconstitutional and illegal ways but they have failed to identify any constitutional clause or law of the land, which is being violated by the PCB,” Salman said.

“Some petitions were also filed in honourable courts against the PCB and some of them have been dismissed and others are pending, but no one could succeed to get any adverse or stay order against our constitution,” he said.

Asked the critics also objected that the government had its involvement in the PCB affairs, Salman said the PCB had not received any such objection from the game’s governing body. He said the ICC did not allow any government intervention in cricket operations and administrative affairs, and cited examples like appointing captain of Pakistan team or selectors etc etc.

Salman, however, admitted that there has been a considerable delay in complete implementation of the new constitution. When confronted with the fact that almost eight months had passed but neither the cricket associations at the provincial nor at the city level could be formed while no matches at the grassroots level or inter-city level could be held, Salman admitted that complete implementation of the new constitution was always expected to take time as it was a massive task which needed to be addressed through a step by step process.

Initially, demarcation of cricket associations was carried out, model constitutions of such associations were drafted, and subsequently approved by the BOG. Thereafter, the territorial demarcation of City Cricket Associations was carried out and their model constitutions were also drafted and later approved. Completion of these steps had now enabled documentation to be prepared for registration of Cricket Associations as societies which was ready for submission.

“It is unfortunate that due to coronavirus pandemic, the registration offices are closed as the PCB wants to get the registration of all the cricket associations done at the earliest,” he said.

Salman said some 20 to 28 to 30 local tournaments were held since August 2019 which included grass-root level cricket. But when reminded that zonal and district level cricket were essential to pick the provincial level teams as local cricket had no concerned with it, he said that fans had witnessed quality domestic cricket last year among six provincial team with domestic matches being streamed live for the first time and as the things were in process to form the cricket associations, cricket at every level would be held in the next domestic cricket season.

When asked why despite abolishing of the regional and departmental cricket teams, their representatives were in the BoG and participating in decision making and why the new BoG had not become functional despite a lapse of eight months, Salman said: ”The new constitution does not have any binding that the new BoG would start functioning immediately. In fact, Article 49 provides for a transitional period in which mass restructuring would take place and so it will take time but we have taken several steps to completely revamp the structure.

“During this time the members of the old BOG are to continue functioning. In any case this should not be objectionable as even in a hypothetical scenario - where the new Constitution had not been promulgated - these same members would have continued to serve as BoG members,” Salman clarified.

Asked if it was not a mistake on the PCB’s part of involving Companies Registration Act as it had already wasted almost four months to get the registration for all cricket associations, Salman said it was essential to run the PCB and its affiliated units on corporate governance principles with proper checks and balances and that it was a time consuming exercise to reform the whole system.

He added that there is no cut-off date by which all the cricket associations would be registrated but PCB intended to proceed speedily since a lot of the foundation work had now been completed.

It may be mentioned here that the PCB chairman Ehsan Mani in his last media talk had disclosed that by the end of April, the cricket associations would be announced after the registration.

To a question that when the new BoG would be formed, he said that from a pool of four independent directors and three presidents of the different cricket associations a total of 4 had to be inducted on to the BoG for the new BoG to come into force.

He concluded by saying the elections of PCB Chairman Ehsan Mani was held for a period of three years according to the prevailing PCB constitution.

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2020