Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chief executive Wasim Khan strongly reprimanded veteran Mohammad Hafeez and asked him to "focus on his own cricket" following his comments questioning the return of Sharjeel Khan to competitive cricket.
Sharjeel was banned for five years by the PCB for his role in the Pakistan Super League (PSL) 2017 spot-fixing scandal. However, the board soon suspended the sentence against the left-hand batsman following an unconditional apology in 2019, which paved way for his comeback to the professional game.
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It still didn't look like that he would play in this year's edition of the PSL until Karachi Kings brought him in as their opening batsman.
Sharjeel's performances, though - only 199 runs in 10 innings - raised doubts about his physical fitness, with Hafeez replying to a query on the same over Twitter, writing "Shouldn't we set Standards of Dignity & Pride Higher than any other "Extra Talent" to represent Pakistan."
But those comments didn't go down well at all with CEO Wasim.
"Current players should not be going up on social media to criticise other players or talk about what policies the cricket board should or shouldn't have," ESPNcricinfo quoted Wasim as saying in a video link from Lahore. "They can have their opinions about various things about world cricket and cricket in general but not about the rights and wrongs of players and the boards and they should leave that to cricket board to answer."
"I will be personally speaking to Mohammad Hafeez about that and I don't think it's his place to be doing it. No other player in the world does that so why should our Pakistani players do that? I don't think they have any space to do that and I don't think they should be doing that.
"That's my personal view. Coming from an English environment, I never saw an English player tweet about policies, procedures, talking about other players' right or wrong," he added.
"My view is, he should focus on his own game, focus on the cricketing opinion he can give but don't give personal opinion about other players."
(Inputs from ESPNcricinfo)
