Financial sanctions and fear of grave repercussions from the Asian Cricket Council and ICC forced the Pakistan Cricket Board to play their Asia Cup Group A match against the UAE in Dubai on Wednesday.
The PCB had decided to pull out of the game, almost two hours before the scheduled start (8pm IST), after the ICC retained Andy Pycroft as match referee. The players were asked to stay put in their hotel rooms even as their kits were loaded onto the team bus.
However, a meeting involving PCB chair Mohsin Naqvi and former chairs Najam Sethi and Ramiz Raja in Lahore led to a softening of stand. Finally, the match started at 9pm.
It was not clear who okayed the delay even as the UAE players were left stranded at the stadium.
Match referee Andy Pycroft walks back after the toss during the Asia Cup cricket match between Pakistan and United Arab Emirates at Dubai International Cricket Stadium, United Arab Emirates, Wednesday
At the end of a day of high drama, Naqvi, who is also the current president of the ACC, posted on X that the team had belatedly left the hotel for the stadium.
The PCB later issued a statement claiming Pycroft had “apologised to the manager and captain” of Pakistan and that Sunday’s “incident was a result of miscommunication”. Later at a news conference, Naqvi urged that “politics and cricket shouldn’t be mixed.”
The development though came as a huge face-loss for the PCB, which had initially decided to concede the match. The PCB’s contention was that Pycroft had sided with the Indian team by allowing Suryakumar Yadav not to shake hands with Salman Agha.
It maintained that Pycroft had told Agha that there would be no handshakes at the toss, which it felt was in contravention to the MCC laws and against the spirit of the game. The players too didn’t exchange pleasantries after India’s win on Sunday.
They filed a complaint with ICC general manager Wasim Khan and demanded that
Pycroft be removed. However, the ICC in a communique to the PCB emphasised that there was no wrongdoing on the match referee’s part. The world body refused to budge, since it would set a bad precedent.
The ICC also noted that Pycroft had actually prevented an embarrassment for both captains by discreetly advising them to avoid handshakes and that he had not violated any protocols while acting on advice given to him by ACC officials.
Several rounds of discussions later, the ICC refused to make any change to the match-officials’ roster for Wednesday. The PCB is understood to have emailed a second letter to the ICC on Tuesday night detailing that it was not happy with the findings into the handshake controversy.
Earlier in the day, several top officials of the Emirates Cricket Board and Oman Cricket also stepped in to defuse the crisis emerging out of PCB’s threat to pull out.