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Postponed, Not Cancelled
By Tabrez Janjua for Stani Army in Pakistan Cricket
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It has been announced that Australia has not cancelled but postponed its tour of Pakistan. What’s the difference I hear you ask? well my guess is as good as yours. In my previous post I raised the issue how the boards and players had done the situation no favours by bringing it out in the open but it did at the very least give us a view of just how the two boards operate.
Cricket should be something totally separated from politics yet in Pakistan this is hardly ever the case and the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) can take most of the blame for this. How do you separate the game from politics when the Patron of your board is the current President? This has led to the current situation in which Pakistan cricket continues to be linked with terror and the current security situation all over the world. Now when the PCB’s Chairman Dr Ashraf insists that the postponement of this tour will have no affect on future cricket in Pakistan he is just kidding himself. The Asia Cup takes place at the end of June and I’m sure that the nations involved would seriously ask themselves that if it’s not safe enough for the leading test nation then is it safe enough for us.
Cricket Australia (CA) was always going to pull out, they didn’t even send a security assessment team, but just dragged the situation on and on eventually calling their pull out a postponement rather than a cancellation. Maybe this has something to do with a possible threat of legal action by the PCB since now CA can say that they are still going to tour but not right now. The way I see it is if they postpone their 2008 tour to Pakistan and don’t tour in 2008 then it’s not a postponement, it’s a cancellation. Yes they can say we will tour in 2010 or whenever but it’s not the same tour, not the same time and will not involve the same players. It has been obvious to me that the PCB has been let down slowly by CA and now by their use of semantics they’re just making fools of the PCB who probably don’t need any help even at the best of times.
Let’s play with bat and ball and not with words because then that would be politics and not cricket wouldn’t it.
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March 12th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Postponed, cancelled, its the same thing. In the last post the person replied that the Aussies did not moan when they were in the UK during the 7/7 bombings. Just because its Pakistan, they feel the security measures are poor.
I think the Bangladeshis will be coming instead so at least they trust our security!
March 12th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Imran, I don’t know about poor security mate but what I would say is that it’s easier to do something bad like that in a country like Pakistan because of its fragmented social infrastructure if you know what I mean.
I just feel that exposing the cricketers to danger was too much of a risk for CA. I agree with the writers previous post where he said that it was unfortunate that the issue had to be brought into the public domain. I think once this happened then the tour was never really going to happen.