Every cricket board has a websites which is an important source of live scores across all cricket played by the country besides putting up key documents regarding the functioning of the board, interviews of the players, profiles of the budding players and, more importantly, hard news.
Cricket Australia has seemingly the best website of all the cricket playing countries.
The cricket.com.au website is a delight to visit. It has all the relevant information of cricket matches involving Australia, be it the national team, women’s team, under age teams and domestic cricket. They also post invaluable videos which are allowed by various media houses to use for their purposes.
England’s is not far behind. The ECB has a team that keeps the website vibrant and useful. So has the Indian board, the BCCI. The BCCI last year bagged a USD 2.55 billion for granting the IPL media rights to Star Sports. The board also gets the maximum revenues from the ICC, USD 405 million. The BCCI invest a lot of this money on its website.
The players mostly give interviews to their board’s websites and from there other media houses use these.
But Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) is unique in many ways. So has been its approach towards its website. There are some 15-20 people employed for the website but if for any reason you visit the pcb.com.pk site you will be left shocked. The deserted look on the website smacks of poor work by those who are in charge of the site. For many days the site is not updated. You will find material of years relating to BC and that of present day.
In fact the deserted look of the PCB website is for a reason.
The digital rights of Pakistan cricket has been sold, or you can say, GIFTED to cricingif. The name promptly suggests that it’s a gift from the PCB. Shockingly, the rights are sold at very cheap rates of 50,000 US dollars and those who are using it as a tool to take everything and anything of Pakistan cricket.
Initially the rights were sold to BLITZ, the company which also sold the rights of Pakistan Super League. You know the kickbacks were involved so after the company could not handle it comes the RAO brothers who are answer to every PCB problem. The set of brothers have become millionaire by selling commercial rights of the PCB while the marketing department led by blue eyed lady of Najam Sethi, Ms Nayla Bhatti, who earned a whooping salary by looking busy but doing nothing.
In an another blatant act of nepotism came Zaynab Abbas, who is suppose to be the step daughter of Nayla. She was made the resource person for all the contents of the CRICINGIF. So all the exclusive interviews and videos which should have been on the PCB websites can only be seen on the gifted website.
As far as the news are concerned they are shared with a private television channel.
In this regard the PCB is not only losing money but its website is deprived of its own exclusive material.
Besides a lot of expectations from the new PCB chairman Ehsan Mani one also hopes that he takes notice of the GIFTED website and bring back the content meant for PCB website to its true home.