Pakistan Cricket Board Chairman Najam Sethi has been making headlines with his statements over the conduct of Asia Cup 2023. The six-team tournament remains in chaos as the BCCI has maintained that Team India won’t travel to Pakistan. On the other hand, the PCB has presented a ‘hybrid model’, offering India to play all their games in the UAE but the BCCI is yet to respond.
Back in February, Sethi spoke at length with BCCI secretary Jay Shah on the sidelines of the Asian Cricket Council’s executive board meeting in Bahrain. However, the PCB chief hasn’t received a satisfying response from Shah. Recalling his conversation with Shah in an exclusive interview with News 9, the PCB chief stated that the BCCI secretary isn’t aware of many things that happened in the past.
“During the meeting in Bahrain, Jay Shah and I had a three-hour long one-on-one in a very comfortable surrounding where he was lodged. And for an hour or so, we didn’t talk about any bilateral series,” said Sethi.
“We talked about everything else under the sun and then we came to the main subject. I realised that he didn’t know much about what had happened in the past between India and Pakistan. So I said, OK, listen, do you know what happened in 2014 when Mr. Srinivasan signed a contract with us and then let us down by not playing? He wasn’t aware of it,” he added.
Sethi claimed he was invited to a meeting in India during Srinivasan’s tenure as the BCCI chief. However, the meeting got cancelled and he had to receive backlash from media and board members when he returned to Pakistan.
“Then I brought him up to date. I said this is how we were humiliated when we were asked to come to Mumbai for a meeting with the BCCI. When we landed at the hotel and waited for them to pick us up and take us to the board, they didn’t even come to say hello to us. The police came in and said, sorry, the meeting’s been cancelled, you have to go back, and they escorted us back to the airport.
“When we returned to Pakistan, we were tarred and feathered. The government went for us. The media went for us. There were calls for the resignation of the then-chairman, Mr. Shahryar Khan. It was a very terrible situation for us. I was screwed, frankly, because I’m the one who signed that contract. Everybody had said to me, India will never honour its contract. And I said, come on, it’s not as bad as that. Things will be fine. I had signed on the dotted line as far as the big three were concerned at the urging of India. Otherwise, we were sitting out. We had said we don’t support the big three. You’ve got nine guys, go ahead and sign it. We won’t sign it. That’s fine. You have a majority. No problem.
“Mr. Srinivasan came to me and said, no, you have to be the 10th. It has to be unanimous. I said, what’s on the table for me? And then we sat down and in three hours, we wrote this contract whereby India was supposed to play Pakistan in 2015 in Dubai and play about 10 matches. And then in October, when the time came around, India backed out. The BCCI backed out. How do you think we felt? So right now, there are some suggestions that if Mr. Shah was to give us a written letter that India will play Pakistan next year or whatever, I’m afraid that’s not going to have any value for us. We’ve been bitten once and twice. I don’t think we’ll accept anything other than something on the ground.”
Comments
0 comment