LAHORE: The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has failed to announce new dates for the Inter-city Senior Cricket Championship after quietly postponing its scheduled start date of July 5.

Though no official reason has been given yet to the stakeholders for the postponement, there are reports in the cricket circles that the event was deferred because PCB’s high-ups had received several complaints from across the country against the selection of 90 city teams by its own appointed coaches.

Furthermore, a number of cities are yet to get their coaches, to be appointed by the PCB, so the tournament was postponed signifying poor planning in the working of the PCB. The coaches appointed by the PCB, it seems, favoured many blue-eyed players in the 90 city association teams, including sons of Test cricketers like Ramiz Raja, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Manzoor Elahi and Akram Raza were selected.

Seven, eight players of Shah Faisal Club were selected to the West Zone team.

Interestingly, former international Irfan Fazil is a paid coach of the Shah Faisal Club and he was one of the coaches, who picked the six teams of Lahore City.

It may be mentioned here that it would be the first time after two years the PCB was going to hold domestic cricket at this level. Last time, the inter-district event was organised in 2018 while in 2019 the PCB introduced its new constitution in which all districts and club affiliations were cancelled by the Board.

After no inter-district or inter-city level cricket for two years, the PCB this year is going to resume the contests. However, ill planning is quite visible in the affairs of domestic cricket.

It may be mentioned here that after two and a half years since introducing the new constitution, the PCB has only managed to announce the chairmen of the six provincial associations in February 2021. The chairmen are appointed for one year on ad hoc basis but still the PCB could not appoint chief executives of four provincial associations, barring Central and Southern.

Still general manager operations, manager finance in all the six provincial associations are to be appointed, while only seven months are left of one year appointment of the ad hoc bodies. After the passage of five months, not a single decision has been announced by any of these six chairmen of the provincial associations.

If all this is not enough, the PCB is still to announce the city associations’ coaches for Balochistan, Southern Punjab and Northern

Cricket Associations, as it has only named the coaches for Sindh, Central Punjab and KP associations.

Without appointing the coaches of these three provincial associations, the PCB had announced the teams of all the 90 cities and draws of the senior cricket championship, but only to postpone it for an indefinite period, which goes on to show that the PCB is not ready to launch domestic competitions with comprehensive planning even after missing it out for the last two years.

Meanwhile, the three provincial associations in which the PCB had appointed coaches, many are working in other departments on a regular basis. Whereas the PCB policy restricts all its paid employees to draw only one salary.

Last year, Balochistan coach Faisal Iqbal was sidelined by the PIA as he could not submit the NOC of his parent body PIA, allowing him to do paid job with the PCB as coach.

However now a number of coaches, who are the employees of Wapda, Sui Gas and other departments, have been hired for the city teams’ coaching by the PCB.

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2021