Unfulfilled promise

Three long years have passed since the cricket boards of Pakistan and India signed a contract on playing a Test series against their sides. Somewhere along the intervening period both interest and patience began to run out. Not so Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chief Shaharyar Khan who refuses to give up on the series or allow India to forget its contractual obligation – for very good reason.

In a statement, Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chief Shaharyar Khan again reminded his fellow signatory that what they had together agreed in 2014 was a contract and not a memorandum of understanding – which assures some commercial certainty but isn’t legally binding. The statement came in the wake of a Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) response to PCB’s legal notice and demand for $6.4 million over the latter’s breach of contract. The Indian board has drawn up two objections to the PCB claim. Neither of the objections, however, is valid, according to Shaharyar Khan.

Apparently the Indian government, more than its cricket board, has been stonewalling the idea of resuming cricket ties between the two teams. Unlike New Delhi, Islamabad has shown no such inclination to bar the two sides from playing out their rivalries on the field. Pakistan, it must be recalled, backed the Big Three proposal under which India reaped heavy profits. Surely PCB has a right to expect some of those profits even if retrogressively. A bilateral series between the two sides would have guaranteed some of those profits.

The legal battle will probably go to the finish line in which case the dispute will be handled by the ICC resolution committee. One hopes that our legal team has done its homework and is able to convince all parties concerned about the financial losses suffered by our cricket board. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is probably rooting for the resumption of cricket between Pakistan and India.