PCB’s Covid-19 negligence and mismanagement a lesson for other boards going forward
The Premier League has restarted, both La Liga and Serie A are heading towards what looks like a final day slugfest to decide the winner and Tennis just had a failed, unsuccessful attempt at restarting the sport. Yet all these events have had nothing on the kind of drama the PCB has churned out.
Yes, they did it again. Pakistan cricket’s goofiness off the field never ceases to amaze, does it? After hogging the limelight for the entirety of the last twelve months - thanks to the Umar Akmal fiasco, public spats between players and the board, the never-ending tussle with the BCCI and the World Cup ‘injustice’ - the Men in Green are at it again, in the midst of a global pandemic. But this time, it is not in the least bit funny. This time, it is a matter of life and death and the Pakistan Cricket Board’s (PCB) actions have come off as arrogant, ignorant, reckless and impatient.
It is hard to deny or dispute the fact that the board have been dealt a tough card, but through the drama that has unfolded, it has been crystal clear that PCB has been blinded by the possibility of crossing the finish line - which, in this case, is Pakistan becoming just the second team in the whole world, after the Windies, to successfully tour England and play their part in bringing the sinking sport back to the shore. Pakistan’s ambition is welcome and laudable and their efforts in reaching the goal have been commendable which needs to be appreciated. But the board’s callousness in handling the situation has been nothing but flabbergasting.
PCB CEO Wasim Khan reprimanding Mohammad Hafeez for publicly announcing that he tested Covid-19 negative has, for obvious reasons, been the single biggest talking point of the whole fiasco but what needs to be understood is that it’s just a microcosm of the board’s priorities which, as has been evident from their actions, has not really been the health and safety of the players. In fact, through both their words and actions, the board have indicated that all they ever were worried about was someway, somehow dumping the players into the Chartered Flight, sending them to England and handing them over to the ECB so they can be relieved of being responsible for anything that goes wrong.
The initial plan they chalked out was not too bad - they planned two sets of tests, the first one individually and then the second after gathering the players at a hotel, and made it strict that only those players who test ‘negative’ twice would be deemed eligible to fly out to England; this was the right thing to do. However, it has been their lack of preparedness for the worst-case scenario that has been dumbfounding.
Despite Pakistan being a walking Covid-19 hotspot, ten of the squad members testing positive was something that was completely out of the board’s hands, but they have ended up leaving a bitter taste through their lack of sensitivity and their inability to slow things down and take a step back. Despite over one-third of their entire squad testing positive, the board were reluctant to alter the plans to fly out the players to the UK on June 28; their excuse to not delay the travel was that it was ‘predominantly white ball players’ who tested positive and given it’s the Test matches that were scheduled to kick-start the series, it did not hinder or disrupt their ‘red-ball plans’.
In fact, such was the board’s stubbornness that for a brief while, they were giving serious consideration to the possibility of doing away with the ‘Two negative tests’ criteria, for the original rule meant that a vast majority of their players would miss out on boarding the flight to England. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, to top it all off, Wasim Khan publicly admonished Hafeez for going public with his Covid-19 results; Khan’s words ended up coming out as extremely distasteful and insensitive, especially given the fact that the person he was condemning was a player in distress.
The unfortunate chain of events that have unfolded over the course of the last week has made it quite clear that the PCB do not have a great understanding of the virus. Various studies have shown that tests may miss more than 1 in 5 COVID-19 cases and the complexity of the virus also means that a person is very much capable of testing positive on a third, fourth or fifth attempt, despite testing negative in the first few tries.
It is absurd that the board even contemplated ditching the ‘two-Test protocol’ in the first place and it is now important that they keep monitoring the players, including all those who tested negative. Contrary to Khan’s suggestion, flying the 10 players who tested positive to England once they test negative twice, at this point in time, might just be not so wise; perhaps it would help if the board takes a step back and treads carefully. The last thing they would need happening, one would imagine, is an outbreak similar to what happened in the WWE, where sheer ignorance led to two dozen people in the company testing positive.
The ECB, too, are gullible and should take a lion’s share of the blame, for the sheer fact that all this while, all they’ve managed to do is constantly persuade the PCB to speed up the process and get their players on English soil. Statements like, “We need to get our opposition in (the) country. Anything that puts that at risk or in danger is clearly a problem,” from England’s Director of Cricket, Ashley Giles, showed little regard to the severity, complexity and the magnitude of the situation and spoke less of the boards’ concern for the players and more of their ‘ultimate goal’ of getting cricket back to its feet.
The two boards, if anything, should be grateful that the situation did not blow up and has instead simmered down. They’ve got their wish granted now, for the Pakistan players have landed in England, safe and sound, but what needs to be not forgotten is the mismanagement, unpreparedness and impatience that came about in handling the issue - something that should serve a lesson for every other board across the world, going forward.