MATCH REPORTS
STAT SHEET
DIARY
HOT LINKS
OTHER SPORTS
SLIDE SHOW
BOOKS & THINGS
PEOPLE
DEAR REDIFF

Sohail to apologise - but what of the allegations?

The Pakistan Cricket Board has finally ended its silence, and issued a statement on the Aamir Sohail issue.

And in essence, the compromise arrived at is that if Sohail submits a written apology to the PCB, it will be considered by the PCB council "on pure merit", and a decision will then be taken on whether or no to lift the two-year suspension imposed on him.

All of which seems clear enough - Mushahid Husain, sports advisor to Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, had proposed the compromise formula last Saturday, the PCB executive had considered it, and this is the response.

However, the whole thing resembles nothing so much as a duck in a pond. Calm and tranquil on the surface, true - but beneath the surface, there's a lot of heavy-duty paddling going on.

PCB Chief Executive Officer Majid Khan indicated to the media that there was absolutely no governmental pressure on him to reverse the two-year ban handed out to Sohail. "It is up to Sohail to tender the letter of apology, which will be viewed strictly on merit," the former Test star said.

However, PCB sources indicate that PCB chairman Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah Bokhari, following a one on one meeting with Mushahid Husain, had urged the PCB council to reverse its decision and lift the ban, even before Sohail's letter was received. Bokhari relented only when the members of the PCB disciplinary committee unanimously threatened to resign if the government tried to apply pressure on them to reverse the ban. Majid Khan is also understood to have threatened to resign if the ban imposed on Sohail was unilaterally withdrawn.

So that is where the matter rests now - Sohail will in all probability tender the apology. The PCB will "consider it on merits". And, in all probabilty, withdraw the ban. The "interests of cricket" will have been duly served.

Or will it? It needs keeping in mind that the issue, here, is not about Sohail's "indiscipline". Behind it is the larger issue, of charges of bribery and corruption levelled by a current player against his own contemporaries. In fact, subsequent to Mushahid Hussain's intervention, Sohail has gone on record that he has all the relevant papers, and is prepared to prove his allegations in the interest of the sport and of the country.

An apology, and the lifting of the ban, thus will not solve the problem. A complete - and, hopefully, public - enquiry is needed before the curtain can really come down on this matter.

Cricket can afford no less. Because if the allegations are true, then the people concerned, whoever they are, need to be punished, so that the lingering doubts in the mind of people are totally erased. And if the allegations are not true, then that should be established, too - and the leveller of these allegations should be disciplined, if only to ensure that in future, such baseless allegations are not flung around to the detriement of the game.

An interesting footnote: This Sunday, the three member Disciplinary Committee was at the Gadhafi Stadium to probe match-fixing allegations in a Patron's Trophy game between UGC and Pakistan Railways. The umpires who did duty in that match gave both teams a clean chit, and the case was then dropped.

Not completely, though, because Majid Khan has since summoned the two captains, who failed to turn up on Sunday for the enquiry. Developments - as the press handouts say - are awaited.