 The Pakistan Cricket Board has not attended a meeting that was organised by the
organising committee of the 2011 world cup which ruled that the original ruling
on Pakistan not hosting the tournament will stand. The ruling also said
that the matches will now be redistributed amongst the other three nations which
will host the tournament; India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
The ICC event's Central Organising Committee (COC) met on Tuesday in Mumbai
to decide on the fact that the 14 games that Pakistan were supposed to host
will now be shared by the others and then launch the logo of the 2011 world
cup.
PCB boycotted the meeting, but had sent its director of cricket operations,
Zakir Khan to attend the evening's function. With all eyes on Zakir, there wasn't
much coming from him and he remained tight-lipped through out the evening. This
was also attended by the player representatives like Dilip Vengsarkar,
Michael Bevan, Clive Lloyd and Aravinda de Silva.
Earlier, the ICC had requested the organising committee to suggest alternative
solutions to not having the games played in Pakistan, and the committee
has come out with this solution. This has been accepted and sent across to the
ICC board. There were other decisions that were ratified from the previous meeting
was the shifting of the secretariat from Lahore to Mumbai. It was also confirmed
that the finals will be played in India (mostly in Mumbai), the semi-finals
in India and Sri Lanka, while the quarter-finals will be held in India, Sri
Lanka and Bangladesh, with the latter hosting two games.
The ICC said that it will announce the world cup schedule later.
This essentially means that neither Pakistan, nor the middle-east countries
like the UAE will get to host any of the world cup games, as was proposed by
the PCB. This also could allow the PCB to go ahead with the legal proceedings
which they had initiated after the previous organising committee meeting.
The ICC also said that it will ask the Pakistani board to nominate three representatives
so that they could join the organising committee. Prof. Ratnakar Shetty
was also reconfirmed as the tournament-director and he said that everyone recognised
that there is a lot of hard work that needs to be put, but they were 'confident
we are now well on the way, with operational plans in place to become effective
from the start of August'
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