Former Captain Younis Khan, who doesn't deserve even a place in T20 or ODI side.

For all those still scratching their heads, wondering why our cricketers do what they do, the time has come to rest easy: the greatest unsolved mystery after The Bermuda Triangle and Who Killed JFK has in fact been solved.

The clues were always there, they just had not been presented to the public in court. A private channel decided to convene a ‘hearing’ of sorts, beamed in the form of a five-hour live transmission. The prosecution and witnesses included former PCB chairmen, politicians linked to cricket administration, former cricketers (most of whom have served in an official capacity with the PCB), media people, the PCB Governing Board members (who can be considered both former and current at the same time – another novel claim emanating from Pakistan).

The only role that remained unfilled was that of the defense. No one from the PCB made an appearance, except the man who refuses to leave and is leading a public rebellion from within. And no one was forthcoming when a former selector was accused during the program of taking a million-rupee-plus bribe to induct a player or a national captain whose integrity was questioned.

Present in the ’galleries’ were the people who own the country’s cricket. Every 15 minutes they were heard through live feeds from all major cities of Pakistan.

An hour into the show and the ‘jury’ had already reached a decision without waiting for a summary at the end of the proceedings: Don’t blame the cricketers; it’s the board, people. Normally this would read ‘It’s the Board, Stupid,’ but in this case, no one’s stupid except those claiming to be the messiahs who will part the seas and walk us through.

There is more purpose and coordination among street janitors when they change shifts. In those five hours, it became evident that not a single board administrator had spent an overlapping period with his predecessor after taking up a function; worse, no one had set up a system for that.

No one presented solutions for a first-class structure. There were random references to what they had personally ‘achieved’ in the past, finger pointing at predecessors for leaving a mess, and jibes at successors for not taking past initiatives forward.

Not one official backed up their gripes with documentary evidence, if there exists any at all, created in their time. Sen. Enver Baig’s references to documents were ignored, avoided or denied because of sheer bigotry and a strategy of almost all that this program should be used for conveying that the speaker is the only intelligent, decent and patriotic person among them all. This was not a muqadma (trial). This was a set of people who had little respect for each other’s presence, let alone views.

Not a single official had a copy of any written minutes for reference purposes. Not one person presented the existing selection policy for captain and team; everyone blamed lack of discipline, but no one carried with them the credibility of being disciplined themselves or disciplining anyone in a timely manner when they were in charge, including Jamshed Dasti of the Muzaffargarh incident.

Everyone cited the high salaries of board officials, but no one rationalised the salary structure with any calculated presentation, nor was the suggestion of halving salaries floated. There is more planning for display and selling in Sunday bazaars than there was by past and present officials.

We also found out that no chairman (who also holds the power of CEO) came to the office regularly; in fact, mostly lived in other cities because of the core function they were doing for the government. Their accountability was to the president, who has always been too busy ensuring his own survival.

And then there was the unproductive mudslinging. Javed Miandad made all the problems of the PCB and its chairman public, but was miffed as to why his salary and allowances (amounting to a million rupees per month before taxes) had been made public. And that too as part of an accusation that he’s only put in a week’s worth of work.

Meanwhile, Dasti, head of the parliamentary sports committee in which he charged Younis Khan with matchfixing kept totally mum while Imran Khan castigated his committee for having no right to call for explanations of cricket issues.

Sadly, the ‘neutral lawyers’ did not ask the former chairman about specific instances in which they had personally overruled their subordinates’ publically announced decisions or interfered in selection decisions. Why, for instance, did no one raise the issue of a player being pampered with an individual coach and doctor at the board’s expense? Or why an injured bowler was sent as reinforcement without the go-ahead of the then CEO or selection committee? And why interfere at all?

And if the chairman and director general seem to be starring in their own version of The War of The Roses, what can one expect from the Akmal brothers, the coaches, and the cricket team itself. No one will respect instructions from officials who cannot get beyond blue collar supervisors in a professional organisation.

By: Sohaib Alvi