Your right to know Saturday, September 10, 2022
LAHORE: The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) will write to the International Cricket Council (ICC) to “lodge a protest” over the crowd trouble and “gruesome visuals” that followed the Afghanistan-Pakistan game at the Asia Cup. Addressing the media, PCB chairman Ramiz Raja said: “You can’t link hooliganism with cricket and this environment makes you sick. We will write to ICC, raise concerns, and do whatever we can because the visuals were gruesome. “This (crowd trouble after an Afghanistan-Pakistan game) didn’t happen for the first time. Wins and losses are a part of the game. It was a gruelling contest, but emotions should have been kept in control. Until the environment is right, you can’t grow and go forward as a cricket-playing nation. So we are going to express our anguish and frustration to the ICC. We owe it to our fans, anything could have happened… Our team could have been in danger… So whatever the protocol is we will follow that and lodge our protest.” Raja is also part of the ICC’s working committee tasked with reviewing the state of cricket and how it is run in Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover of the country last year.
Following a spectacular, see-sawing game in Sharjah, in which Afghanistan were fighting hard to stay in the tournament only for Pakistan’s last-wicket pair to dramatically clinch their own spot in the final, crowd trouble erupted in the stands. Several Afghanistan fans were detained by the Sharjah police following the incident. However, no arrests were made. Tempers flared as soon as Pakistan brought up victory courtesy Naseem Shah’s twin sixes in the final over. In the aftermath, fans, believed to be Afghanistan supporters, began throwing punches at people wearing Pakistan jerseys. The Afghanistan Cricket Board put out two tweets on September 8 calling for people to “work together” to bring the “cricket fraternity closer”, and “somehow try to spread love”. Afghanistan and Pakistan are set to next face each other on October 19, in a warm-up match in Brisbane in the lead-up to the T20 World Cup. The teams are not in the same group in the first stage of the tournament.
Flashpoints between Afghanistan and Pakistan fans are not an uncommon occurrence. At last year’s T20 World Cup, “thousands of ticketless fans” from both teams tried to force entry into the stadium in Dubai. When this was met with resistance by the local ground authorities and private security agencies, heated exchanges between both sets of fans led to the external barriers being pushed over. The increased number of incidents stems to some degree from longstanding and complex geopolitical tensions between the two countries.
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