Shahid Afridi has his personal agenda: Ex-PCB Chairman

Former ICC and PCB Chairman Ehsan Mani has said that former cricketers like Shahid Afridi and others have their personal agenda’s when they speak about PCB and Pakistan cricket affairs.

Recently, Shahid Afridi  had said that the current PCB chairman, Mohsin Naqvi, admitted to him that he lacks knowledge about cricket. Afridi went further, declaring that the sport in Pakistan is in critical condition, likening it to a patient in the ICU, and insisted that accountability is overdue.

“I do not give any credibility to what Shahid Afridi or anyone else says. They have their personal agendas or whatever. So I wouldn’t go there. No comment on that. All I would say is that leadership must come from the chairman and from the board of directors of PCB. For the rest, I don’t give much credibility to these criticisms,” Ehsan Mani was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.

Pakistan hosted the ICC Men’s Champions Trophy 2025 under a hybrid model, with India’s matches shifted to Dubai. The tournament schedule, however, was only unveiled a mere two months prior, a decision that left former PCB chairman Ehsan Mani unimpressed with the ICC’s management of the eight-team event.

“It’s very disappointing the way it was managed. The responsibility for this is with the ICC. When they allocated events to India and Pakistan, knowing the current relations between the countries, then the onus was entirely on the ICC to ensure that the event and the issues that came up had been dealt with much, much before the tournament actually was starting,” said Mani, who served as the ICC President for the period between 2003 to 2006.

“This was left to the 11th hour. It was totally wrong of the ICC not to have dealt with this much, much earlier. Got both the boards together and come up with an ICC solution, not a PCB or BCCI solution.”