It's the board, people

Blogging on the Dawn, Sohaib Alvi marvels at a five-hour TV show aired in Pakistan - called Cricket Ka Muqadma - that attempted to get to the bottom of the country's latest cricket crisis. Not a single official had a copy of any written minutes for reference purposes, everyone cited the high salaries of board officials, but no one rationalised the salary structure with any calculated presentation, and then there was the unproductive mudslinging.

Present in the ’galleries’ were the people who own the country’s cricket. Every 15 minutes they were heard through live feeds from all major cities of Pakistan. An hour into the show and the ‘jury’ had already reached a decision without waiting for a summary at the end of the proceedings: Don’t blame the cricketers; it’s the board, people. Normally this would read ‘It’s the Board, Stupid,’ but in this case, no one’s stupid except those claiming to be the messiahs who will part the seas and walk us through.

There is more purpose and coordination among street janitors when they change shifts. In those five hours, it became evident that not a single board administrator had spent an overlapping period with his predecessor after taking up a function; worse, no one had set up a system for that.