'Even the reduced 18 months ban is hard on him' - Kamran Akmal dissatisfied over PCB's actions towards Umar Akmal

Banned by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) disciplinary panel since April this year, Umar Akmal is having hard time of his life. He was booked for not reporting two separate cases, where he was being approached for spot-fixing in the Pakistan Super League (PSL). Recently he experienced short-lived happiness where his ban was reduced from 3 years to 18 months by an independent adjudicator of PCB.

To his utter dismay, PCB objected the ban-reduction, and here is when elder brother Kamran Akmal lost his cool. Carrying forward the further process, PCB will be filing an appeal in the Court of Arbitration for International Sports (CAS) against the decision of independent adjudicator, Justice Khokar. However, it isn’t going really well with sibling, Kamran.

He stated, “Umar is being treated unjustly because in the past he has always cooperated with the authorities in such cases and this time also he admitted the mistake of not reporting the matter to the authorities. Even the reduced 18 months ban is hard on him.” In the meantime, PCB has been quite strict on their decision of not letting a cricketer of Umar’s stature get away so easily with the reduced-ban.

Zero tolerance corruption policy of PCB

PCB said in a press release, “The PCB takes matters relating to anti-corruption very seriously and firmly maintains a zero-tolerance approach. The PCB believes a senior cricketer like Umar Akmal was aware of the consequences when, after having attended a number of anti-corruption lectures at the domestic and international level, having witnessed the consequences of indulging in corrupt conduct, still failed to report the approaches to the relevant authorities.”

“The PCB doesn’t take any pride in seeing a cricketer of Umar’s stature being banned for corruption, but as a credible and respectable institution, we need to send out a loud and clear message to all our stakeholders that there will be no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who breaches the regulations.”

The right-handed batsman was booked for the corruption-related charges by Justice (retd) Fazal-e-Miran Chauhan who eventually imposed a ban on him on April 27, 2020. The ban came as a part of PCB’s disciplinary panel under Anti-Corruption laws.

The 30-year old has so far featured in 16 Tests, 121 ODIs, and 84 T20Is with 1003, 3194 and 1690 runs respectively. He was last seen playing against Australia in March 2019 in an ODI. There is no confirmation so as to when he will next see the face of international cricket.