LAHORE: The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has given Provincial Cricket Associations’ (PCA) first boards six-month extensions after their one-year constitutional tenure expired on March 4.

The PCB took two years to make the decision to appoint first boards for all six PCAs after the implementation of the board’s new constitution in August 2019 under the chairmanship of Ehsan Mani.

Ideally, the boards running the PCAs should have been elected through polls at district and provincial levels as soon as the new PCB constitution was implemented, but the cause of the delay turned out to be the requirement for the PCAs to be registered under the Company Act.

However, the Company Act does not have any provision for sporting bodies. Therefore, the PCB decided to by-pass this clause and appointed interim bodies for the PCAs for one year.

During this period, the PCB had to complete the registration of the clubs across the country, conduct their scrutiny and hold the elections in all the districts of the country to elect new office-bearers who’d go on to elect the PCA officials.

The PCB has been paying huge salaries to the interim staff of the PCAs . Though the PCB had succeeded to get sponsorships for some of the associations in the past, there are reports that hardly any sponsors are working with these provincial associations currently.

According to Article 6.6 of the PCB constitution, an interim provincial body can stay for a year and elections have to be conducted in this time frame.

A PCB spokesman told Dawn that the board would give a six-month extension to the first boards of the six provincial associations after getting approval from the Board of Governors.

However, there is no such clause in the PCB constitution that allows even the BoG to extend the tenure of the interim boards.

The PCB spokesman added that the existence of the first boards was necessary and the extension made sense since the constitution does not clearly disallow it.

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2022