PCB's shaming of Shoaib

The Pakistan board unnecessarily revealed the nature of Shoaib Akhtar's injury that forced him out of the World Twenty20 but given long‑standing acrimony that exists between Shoaib and the PCB, one imagines the only real dilemma the blazers faced involved deciding whether or not to accompany their announcement with a global billboard campaign, writes Barry Glendenning in the Guardian.

It would be unfair to expect any man to concentrate on line and length while he's preoccupied with the presence of several cauliflower-like florets where no cauliflower-like florets were ever meant to be, so it is heart‑warming to hear that the PCB has at least left its wayward son in no fewer than three pairs of good and presumably gloved hands. In a scene that calls to mind a trio of match umpires inspecting the contents of a box of cricket balls, their three-man medical board has declared that although Shoaib will not be participating in the World Twenty20 his condition should be reassessed. Presumably by all three of them and possibly on prime-time TV.

In the meantime, the unfortunate 33-year-old has undergone a course of electrofulguration, a treatment that sounds more like the kind of torture designed to break particularly stubborn prisoners who laugh in the face of waterboarding, but involves nothing more sinister than having an instrument not unlike a cattle-prod held close enough to one's manhood for the sparks it generates to desiccate any "unwanted lesions" (as opposed to all those wanted lesions us chaps like to see down there).