Pakistan cricket team in action© Agence France-Presse
The Pakistan Cricket Board is looking to implement a regulation that will prevent any player’s agent or company from signing more than 2 to 3 players at a time for representation. The Cricket Management Committee that manages the board’s affairs is expected to take a final decision on the regulation in the next two days after two agencies signed dozens of Pakistani team players and officials for representation. After realizing that one agent, Talha Rahmani and his company Saya Company, represented 7-8 prominent Pakistani players and officials including Babar Azam, Shaheen Shah Afridi and Mohammad Rizwan, the PCB has now learned that another agency known as the International Cricketers Association (ICA) also has contracts. With many players and officials currently touring Australia.
Concerned by this development, PCB Chairman Zaka Ashraf directed the legal department to frame a new set of regulations to screen agents/companies before signing players and officials and restrict the number of agents they can have at a time in Pakistan cricket.
The ICA apparently has Sarfaraz Ahmed, Imam ul Haq, Saim Ayub, Muhammad Haris, Naseem Shah, Abdullah Shafique, Usama Mir, Aamer Jamal and Muhammad Hasnain on its clients list.
More importantly, Pakistan team manager Mohammad Hafeez was working with ICA until recently.
While Hafeez has resigned, it has now emerged that the national team’s bowling coach Omar Gul, bowling coach Saeed Ajmal, batting consultant Adam Holyoake and the team’s strength and conditioning coach and national selector Kamran Akmal are also clients of the ICA.
Zakka Ashraf has from time to time raised concerns in his interviews that having one agent or company with so many players under its umbrella essentially means that it can have too much influence in team selection and affairs.
In a recently leaked audio chat, Ashraf can be heard saying that when PCB offered Babar Azam the captaincy only after the ODI World Cup, he called up his agent Talha Rehman who advised him to give up the captaincy in all three formats.
“These agents basically have a lot of influence and power in the team through their agents and we are trying to deal with that,” he was heard saying in the leaked audio recording.
The PCB also accepted Nizam-ul-Haq’s resignation as chief selector after it launched a probe into reports that the former captain was an owner in a sports marketing company with Rizwan and Rahmani as his partners.
The investigation was intended to confirm whether Inzamam’s affiliation with the company presented a conflict of interest because he was a paid employee of the board, but the investigation ended after the board said it had accepted Inzamam’s resignation.
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