The league is back

All the right sounds came out of the players’ draft for the second edition of the Pakistan Super League (PSL) which was held in Dubai recently. With several big stars like Chris Gayle, Brendon McCullum, Kevin Pietersen, Shane Watson and Eoin Morgan lining up with Pakistan icons like Shahid Afridi and Misbah-ul-Haq, PSL 2 promised to be bigger and better than the successful launch edition held in the UAE in February this year. On top of it, there was the good news that a ‘fly-in, fly-out’ final of the eagerly-anticipated Twenty20 tournament will take place in Lahore. Such plans, if successful, will provide a boost to the Pakistan Cricket Board’s campaign to bring international cricketing action back to the country. We haven’t seen top-flight foreign cricketers in action since March 2009 when the Sri Lankan cricket team was ambushed by terrorists in Lahore – an incident that turned Pakistan into a no-go zone for foreign sportspersons and resulted in us playing home cricket on foreign soil. The sight of big crowd pullers like Gayle or McCullum entertaining a packed crowd at the Gaddafi Stadium with their six-hitting prowess will certainly be a welcome change.

However, despite the PCB’s optimism, a PSL final in Lahore remains an iffy proposition as many of the foreign stars roped in by the league have linked their participation to the security situation in the lead up to the title clash. The Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations (FICA) has already raised a big question mark over safety issues with one of its top officials stressing that ‘playing cricket in Pakistan for foreign teams and players constitutes an unacceptably high security risk’. Pakistan will have to assuage such fears otherwise there will be little hope that the high-profile PSL final will take place in Lahore. The PSL has quickly established itself as a major T20 league but it will only serve its real purpose if it is held on Pakistani soil. At the end of the day, it is a domestic tournament featuring international stars – an event that should be played in front of domestic audiences. The state-of-the-art grounds in Dubai and Abu Dhabi look good on TV but it’s all cosmetic considering that our own stadiums continue to fade into oblivion.