LAHORE: The present regime of the Pakistan Cricket Board, which has been functioning at a snail’s pace, has not made payments to the officials who officiated the matches of a PCB U-16 event staged in December 2019, it has emerged.

The PCB organised a three-day and a one-day tournament for U-16 age group from Nov 25 to Dec 20, 2019. However, the umpires, referees and scorers of these events are yet to receive their payments.

Making payment to match officials is a very basic and routine practice which hardly takes a couple of months.

However in the case under spotlight, almost seven months have passed and the PCB has not cleared the payments of the event officials.

Here it is pertinent to mention that coronavirus pandemic cannot be given as an excuse for this inordinate delay in making payments since the PCB offices were closed only in the fourth week of March 2020 due to the deadly epidemic.

The officials of the two events (three-day and one-day) have been anxiously waiting for their payments at a crunch as financial problems of a common man have only compounded during the last four months. These difficulties are expected to increase in the future due to the closure or sharp fall in many socio-economic activities across Pakistan in the backdrop of the Covid-19.

Besides this excessive delay in making payments, the PCB has been working sluggishly in other important spheres also.

It proved itself as a slow-moving organisation as since introducing its new constitution on Aug 19, 2019, it has not been able to fully implement it yet.

The reason for this noticeable anomaly is that the PCB — in accordance with the new constitution — has failed to form the six provincial associations and 90 city association bodies. Even the Board of Governors, PCB’s supreme decision-making body, is yet to be revamped.

Due to the new constitution, the current PCB could not even form new general body under the new constitution.

For different reasons, the PCB could not hold a single general body meeting in two years, while according to the constitution holding one annual meeting is mandatory.

It may be mentioned here that the U-16 event was organised by the National Cricket Academy, which has now been replaced with High Performance Centre.

A change of command during this period was made as Nadeem Khan replaced Mudassar Nazar as the head of the centre and domestic cricket on May 31. However, the officials of the U-16 event were kept waiting for their dues.

Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2020