The New Zealand head coach has said that the team didn’t decide to pull out of the tour. It seems the next step is for New Zealand to say that the tour wasn’t cancelled at all. Or maybe they’ll have the decency to admit that the tour was cancelled, but blame Imran Khan. In fact, they may say that he called his New Zealand counterpart to tell her that he was doing so. It’s enough to make Imran find out her corruption.
I hope there’s no corruption involved in the decision to make Tania Mallick the head of women’s cricket. Her main qualification is that she has been women’s badminton champion. I don’t know the connection between women’s badminton and cricket, but I do know that Ameer Bi was once All-India badminton champion. And she was the mother of the Mohammad brothers, four of whom played for Pakistan, two (Heer Bianif and Mushtaq) captaining it. With motherly partiality, she said that her fifth son, Raees was the best batsmen of them all, even though he was the only one who never played Test cricket. Or maybe he was, for while sportswomen become mothers, they’re usually honest, even if it’s about another game.
But apart from that link, if we’re going to have sports cross-fertilizing each other, maybe squash great Jehangir Khan can be inveigled as batting coach, and javeliner Nadeem Arshad, who almost won a medal at the recent Olympics, can be made bowling coach.
You might remember that Rameez ‘Rambo’ Raja began his stint as PCB President by blowing away the New Zealand team. He had also got the coaches to resign, and installed people of his own choosing. Now he’s made PCB Chief Executive Officer Waseem Khan to step down. No replacement has been named yet, but maybe a former hockey captain like Kaleemullah would probably fit the bill.
Rambo cannot be held accountable for Inzamamul Haq’s heart attack, though both he and Imran should think about how someone very much their junior has had a heart attack. True, neither has been as hearty a trencherman as Inzamam, but abstention from greasy food does not cover for age. And Inzamam was younger than both.
Anyway, maybe the PCB needs a female CEO. Why should female sportsmen be restricted to Women’s cricket? I mean, in the recent Iceland elections, they almost elected a female majority legislature. They did, actually, according to the first count, but after a recount were down to 30 of 63 seats.
Elections in Germany meant that not only were they no longer to have a female Chancellor in Angela Merkel, who has held office since 2005 (making her the longest serving Chancellor since Helmut Kohl), but they’ve seen a change in party. Elections in Canada and Russia have seen no change. Imran would like elections like those in 2023. Perhaps not as in Canada, where he PM asked for a majority. Before the poll he headed a minority government, supported from outside by the LDP, which is headed by a Sikh, which sort of makes Canada the nearest thing they’ve got to Khalistan.
Ahead of our elections, though, there’s been dirty work done at the crossroads. The UK’s National Crime Agency has applied for the unfreezing of various accounts of the Sharif family, not having found any evidence of money laundering. All is explained by Mian Nawaz’s presence in London. He must have bribed the NCA investigators. When Shehzad Akbar, the head of the Assets Recovery Unit, held a press conference, he didn’t mention he most telling evidence of Shahbaz’s corruption: his face. Not to mention that he had never won a World Cup for Pakistan.
The NCA had not heard the proof that Fawad Chaudhry presented that the Avenfield flats were the results of corruption on the Motorway. Well, nobody else heard the proof either. Which is that Shehbaz Sharif didn’t build a cancer hospital. The piece of evidence that sets the capstone on the proof of his corruption was that he didn’t eat organic food. Not to forget that all his children were born in wedlock.
