There will now be a final decision on whether Pakistan will host the 2023 Asia Cup, following the failure of a meeting of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) in Bahrain to reach an agreement. A month from now, around the time of the next set of ICC meetings, they will be meeting again.
When the ACC president, and the BCCI secretary, Jay Shah, announced in October that the 2023 Asia Cup will be held in a neutral venue because India cannot travel to Pakistan for the tournament, there was quite a bit of uncertainty surrounding this event.
There was particular discontent among the PCB and ESPNCricinfo understands that on Saturday, their chief Najam Sethi told Shah that if India do not play in Pakistan for the 2023 World Cup, Pakistan will consider not playing in India for the same.
This has led to the deadlock which needs revisiting in March when the ICC and ACC meetings take place one after the other. The issues across tournaments, in the PCB’s views, are the same, whether it is the Asia Cup, the 2023 World Cup or the 2025 Champions Trophy, to be staged in Pakistan. Depending on what happens in those March meetings – and the PCB is liinto those meetings go in again with the same stance – a decision may be left to the Pakistan government to take a call on.
ACC members are also believed to have been asked to seek their governments’ positions on whether or not their teams would be permitted to travel to Pakistan on behalf of the ACC. There wasn’t any discussion of such matters at the meeting, nor was there any indication that any member of the PCB would seek government clearance before playing in Pakistan, according to a statement released on Sunday by the PCB.
As a result of this visit, Sri Lanka was able to tour Pakistan for the second time in 2017 and again in 2019, while Bangladesh toured Pakistan for the first time in 2020. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and all other ICC members have confirmed their tours to Pakistan in the framework of the 2023-2027 Future Tours Programme (FTP). The FTP has been approved and announced by all ICC members.”
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As a result of years of isolation following the attack on Sri Lanka’s bus in Lahore, Pakistan has resumed hosting international cricket regularly over the last three years, with nearly all full members, with the exception of India, having visited the country for both red- and white-ball matches.
There has been a deterioration in relations between the two countries over the last few years as a result of turbulent political relations between the two countries. It has been almost two years since India and Pakistan played each other in a bilateral series, when Pakistan toured India for a limited-overs series in 2012-13. Since 2008, India and Pakistan haven’t played any matches against each other outside of the ICC and ACC tournaments, and when Pakistan travelled to India last year for the 2016 T20 World Cup, the Indian men’s team hadn’t played any matches there since 2008.
As Sethi said in January, “whatever the stance of the PCB may be, it will be in the interests of Pakistan to host the Asia Cup in 2023.”, the PCB seems intent on setting this up as its own stance.
In addition, the executive board of the ACC ratified the ACC’s calendar of activities for the financial years of 2023 and 2024, as well as the inclusion of Japanese and Indonesian teams in the ACC pathway tournaments.
