Pakistan has always paid the price by losing its key players right when they are at the peak of their careers.
MUZAFFARABAD: Saeed Ajmal is banned! If you can’t play them, ban them. This is the formula which the ICC, now powered by the Big-3, has used successfully against Pakistan’s cricket team over the years.
For the last decade or so Pakistan has remained the biggest victim of the ICC’s biased rules and regulations, which seem like they have been formulated to undermine the competitive edge of Pakistani players. The ICC does not care to take immediate steps to revive international cricket in Pakistan which remains suspended to date. It was initially suspended following the 2009 terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team in Lahore. The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has so far suffered heavy financial losses. This is also affecting the overall structure of cricket in Pakistan at all the levels. Banning Pakistani players from participating in the Indian Premier League (IPL) is another effort to damage Pakistani cricket, especially when the ICC seems to be showing interest in the Pakistan Premier League.
The formation of the Big-3 has revealed how the ICC’s decision was controlled and influenced by them. The formation of the Big-3 seems to be a threat to the future of cricket and has made the PCB more vulnerable to the ICC’s biased decisions and regulations and has further isolated the PCB in the cricketing world.
The height of being biased is that the ICC under heavy influence of the Indian cricket board banned the then famous Indian Cricket League (ICL) which had a Pakistani team by the name of Lahore Badshas. In time, the Lahore Badsha’s gained popularity among the Indian crowd and were benefiting financially as well as polishing their cricketing skills. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) came up with the idea of Indian Premier League (IPL) where Pakistani players were banned from participating due to a political issue regarding the Mumbai terrorist attacks. They did not consider the fact the Pakistani players are very popular among the Indian population. The ICC and other cricket boards remained silent spectators to India’s biased decision and are still awfully quiet over this particular issue.
To support the argument that I have made above, if we look back we can see how the ICC and the Big-3 have remained biased towards Pakistan over the years. Back in the late 1980s, Pakistan introduced ‘reverse swing’ and googly, they mastered it which worried the big names in the cricketing world at the time. The ICC banned ball tampering by introducing a new legislation. Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, two fast bowlers, Wasim and Waqar, were pulled apart when bouncer per over was cut down to one through the so-called ICC legislation. In the mid-1990s, Pakistan came up with yet another technique called doosra. The Australian and English players in particular were unfamiliar to this art. The ICC tried to ban this technique as well but ended up introducing the 15-degree angle instead.
In conclusion, Pakistan has always paid the price by losing its key players right when they are at the peak of their careers.
Yaqub Ali
Published in The Express Tribune, September 11th, 2014.
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