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‘Should not get on bad terms with the board’: Shoaib Akhtar’s suggestion to Mohammad Hafeez
A day after PCB announced that 10 cricketers, including Mohammad Hafeez, had tested positive for COVID-19, the former Pakistan captain shared a report claiming he has tested negative.
Shoaib Akhtar, the former Pakistan pacer, feels all-rounder Mohammad Hafeez should have consulted with the Pakistan Cricket Board regarding his outcome of the Covid-19 test than share it with the world online.
Hafeez on Tuesday was said to have tested positive for Covid-19 after the PCB had conducted tests on Pakistan’s cricketers ahead of their departure for the England tour. However, the day after Hafeez was tested positive, the all-rounder shared a tweet with a report from a private medical facility showing he was negative. As per a PCB source, the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital did a retest of Hafeez’s earlier sample and the result once again came out positive, and the way the entire thing panned out did not leave the board impressed.
“PCB showed a bit of mismanagement, we just started doing random testing of players, now players have tested positive for coronavirus, the worst-hit area due to coronavirus is maybe Lahore, then it is Karachi. I am sure that if you keep on testing, you will get more and more positive results,” Akhtar said on his YouTube channel.
“Now, the tests are done, my advice to Hafeez was to go for the retest, but he should not have posted the result of his second Test on Twitter, he should have confronted the PCB, you should not get on bad terms with the board. The tour of England is important for Pakistan, we need to send our solid team there if we want to win the Test series.”
Hafeez was among the 10 Pakistan cricketers to have tested positive for the virus but the fact that he underwent another test privately did not go down too well with the PCB. Wasim Khan, chairman of the board, was miffed with Hafeez for not consulting the PCB, and hence breaking a the protocol, as he went ahead with his own set of tests.
The 10 cricketers who had tested positive were left behind - even though six of them were negative (including Hafeez) in the latest round of tests - as the Pakistan team, on Sunday, left for England with 20 players and 11 support staff.
“I spoke to Hafeez today and I made it clear to him our disappointment at the way he had handled this entire affair. As an individual he has a right to take a private test but he should have spoken to us first because he created a problem for us,” Khan told the Cricket Baaz YouTube channel on Wednesday.
“This is not the first time that Hafeez has breached our rules in the media. He doesn’t have a central contract but once he was selected for the Pakistan team he has to abide by the rules and regulations for all players especially pertaining to the use of social media. We are still looking at the matter because it has caused us a lot of problems.”
