WITH Najam Sethi pulling out of the race for chairmanship, the Pakistan Cricket Board is set to have a third chief in eight months. Mr Sethi, who was leading the board as the head of its interim management committee, stated in a tweet late Monday that he won’t be running for the post of chairman in the upcoming PCB elections. The reason, he said, was because he didn’t want to be “a bone of contention” between PPP chief Asif Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of the PML-N. Both parties are partners in the coalition government and Sethi exiting the race has again highlighted the politics that come with the job. The PM in his capacity as the PCB’s patron-in-chief has always nominated the board’s chairman. But in the case of the coalition government at the centre, the PPP had contended it should be their nominee heading the PCB as it controls sports at the federal level though the Ministry of Inter-Provincial Coordination. The party had made it clear it wanted Zaka Ashraf, who like Sethi is a former PCB chief, to run the country’s cricket. Mr Ashraf was on Tuesday formally nominated to the PCB’s Board of Governors, paving the way for his return to the helm of the PCB with the election process largely a formality. The 70-year-old ran the PCB for 20 months from October 2011 and then for a few months in 2014 with his tenure seeing a legal battle with Mr Sethi.

Mr Sethi’s withdrawal marks the end of a six-month stint after he took over as chief of the management committee following the removal of Ramiz Raja as PCB chairman in December last year. During that time, he’s overseen not only an overhaul of the domestic structure — restoring the previous departmental system undone by the PCB when the PTI government was in power — but also appointed a new management for the national team led by Mickey Arthur. He’s also been a tough negotiator to ensure that Pakistan hosted some part of the Asia Cup, which the Board of Control for Cricket in India was keen to snatch away. Mr Ashraf will now oversee talks regarding Pakistan travelling to India for this year’s World Cup. What happens next remains to be seen but once again it’s evident that the government, and the politics around it, and the PCB remain joined at the hip.

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2023