LAHORE: It seems that player power is on the rise in Pakistan Cricket once again. A series of recent events including the abrupt retirements of Younis Khan and Shoaib Malik as well as a few disciplinary problems indicate that the Pakistan Cricket board is losing its grip over the game’s affairs.

Both Malik and Younis stunned fans and critics alike by abruptly announcing their retirements from Test and one-day cricket respectively during the current England series. Malik was selected for the England Test series after five long years but he startled everyone including the national selectors by suddenly calling it a day from Tests after playing the third and last Test against England.

Younis, too, made a mockery of things and his career when he chose to call time on his ODI career on the morning of the opening match against England at Abu Dhabi.

It may be mentioned here that Younis had remained been quite critical of the national selectors and the PCB for not selecting him in the ODI squads in recent times. It is common knowledge that almost the entire team management, including head coach Waqar Younis, was not in favour of selecting Younis for the ODIs and chief selector Haroon Rasheed had to rush to the UAE to sort out the Younis issue. But when it was finally settled, at the expense of talented middle-order batsman Asad Shafiq, Younis decided to quit the format in a shock announcement on the morning of the opening match at Abu Dhabi.

It can easily be said that weak policies, casual attitude and double standards of the PCB are creating problems in Pakistan cricket. On one hand the PCB punishes Umar Akmal and Saeed Ajmal for violating the code while on the other, it shows leniency towards Shahid Afridi who is fond of making statements on all sorts of issues.

Akmal was not only dropped from the T20 squad announced on Thursday for the England series but was also served a show-cause notice for being involved in alleged immoral activities during a Quaid-i-Azam Trophy match in Hyderabad.

He was initially part of the T20 side but when chief selector Haroon Rasheed met the PCB chairman to get approval of the squad he was asked to drop Akmal because of his indiscipline incident.

In addition to this, the PCB suspended Saeed Ajmal’s central contract for criticising the International Cricket Council. He had said that only Pakistani bowlers were reported for suspect bowling action while Indian bowlers R. Ashwin and Harbajhan Singh were free to bowl illegal deliveries.

Double standard of the PCB was exposed when it only issued a warning to T20 captain Shahid Afridi for giving a statement on the upcoming India series which is in doldrums because of political tension between the two countries.

He had said that he was ready to play in India if they did not want to play in Pakistan or UAE provided the revenue would be shared by both the boards.

Sources said it was the domain of the PCB to issue statement on any policy matter especially on the sensitive issue of Indo-Pak series but Afridi went beyond his role.

As it was not enough, chairman of the PCB’s executive committee Najam Sethi on Friday expressed his personal opinion on the Indian series saying that he would not favour the idea of playing India in India in the upcoming Board of Governors meeting, thus giving a completely opposite statement to what Afridi had said.

Afridi had breached the code of conduct on several occasions in the past. He had also criticised Australia for refusing to tour Bangladesh.

Previous PCB chairman Ijaz Butt had curtailed players power to great extent when he decided to sideline many top cricketers like Younis Khan, Shahid Afridi and Kamran Akmal for their disappointing performance on the Australia tour. All those players returned to the national fold after facing different punishments and since then no big incident of indiscipline was reported but now again things are going out of control.

Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2015