Pakistan deserves a chance to be ICC host

These days so many administrators have been seduced by the big moolah available that they are all too eager to indulge in red carpet treatment of the saucy image-making T20.

As they fall over themselves to embrace this mini-skirted bimbo, they have forgotten their duty towards the game of which they are supposed to be guardians. It is where they are not only ignoring their duty to look after the sport's long term interests, but are in danger of damaging its inherent ability to attract through its star player quality.

They give the appearance that for them the game has now become an incidental exercise, a bargaining chip to play around with, as would a group of eager greedy children with a new set of toys. As self-interest and political agendas have taken over, the mandarins have become an obsequious bunch and largely derelict in their administrative duty.

Perhaps it is what the new men at the head table intended as they now smirk at history and tradition and forsake both because it is more about money than something called player talent than making plans to safeguard the 50 overs ODI and Test formats.

On the day they launched next year's World T20 slug-fest in England it was amid the usual tinsel and gaudy façade it represents. Yet it is also at a time when the game came under heavy international and political siege.

In many respects it is the mainstream administrators who are at fault: those from county, state or provincial backgrounds with their franchise badges, along with those at national and international level.

For a start, the Zimbabwe issue will at last be discussed at the International Cricket Council level five years after it should have been addressed.

Then there is the fifty-overs international format now threatened because there is an equally obsessed fickle media, along with bureaucrats who are likewise fixated by T20 in its various entertainment styles.

In their rush to welcome the shorter version they have been blinded how genuinely bereft it is in skill and there are times when it is as bad as watching the rerun of a poorly made B Grade movie. It is an entertainment, pure and simple and why administrators need to be focussed on the areas that require more attention before they totally wreck a tried and tested product

Amid all this, however, are the dirty politics and South Asia's current status in the game.

It is variously viewed by others as a region which is largely maverick in nature and therefore out of control. An area where governments from Europe to the South Pacific issue daily tourist travel warnings, forgetting of course, how many parts of Africa and Europe are often not much better.