The director of the Pakistan cricket team, Mickey Arthur raised many eyebrows when he called the India-Pak match in the ongoing ICC ODI World Cup 2023 a BCCI event rather than an ICC event and he also called it as a bilateral match. This was said by him after Pakistan lost the match to India by 7 wickets and the Indian team dominated Pak in all the three segments of the game.
Mickey Arthur was not happy with the fact that the Pakistani team had no support in the stadium as Pakistani citizens were not given visas by the Indian government and songs supporting Pakistan were also not played in the stadium.
During the press conference, he said, “Look, I’d be lying if I said it did [not affect us]. It didn’t seem like an ICC event, to be brutally honest. It seemed like a bilateral series; like a BCCI event.”
Recently, the ICC chairman Greg Barclay reacted to this statement and said that they are criticised every time but they will certainly look forward to make improvements and see which events can be held in a better way.
Greg Barclay stated, “Every event that we have, there are always criticisms from various quarters. Things that perhaps we’ll take away and try to work on, try to do better… so this event’s only [at] the start. Let’s see how the whole thing plays out and we’ll go away and we’ll review what could change, what we can do better, how we can improve World Cups and the general offering around cricket. We will just take it as it plays out, get to the end of the event. I’m satisfied that it will still be an outstanding World Cup.”
Many former Pakistani cricketers also didn’t like this statement of Mickey Arthur and they made it clear that he can’t hide behind this excuse as they want to know what exactly went wrong in the match against India.
