The Pakistan Cricket Board has reached an agreement with the organisers of the Abu Dhabi T10 League over No-Objection Certificates for Pakistani players, clearing the way for 16 of the country's cricketers to take part in the tournament, which begins on Friday, 7 November.
The deal was ratified on Thursday, just two days before the start of the competition, after a week in which the participation of the Pakistani players had looked in serious doubt. Geo News and A Sports first reported the agreement on Friday morning, and ESPNcricinfo later confirmed that the two sides had settled the dispute.
Under the arrangement, the PCB will receive a lump-sum payment from the league in return for granting the NOCs, along with access to cricket and training facilities at the Abu Dhabi Cricket and Sports Hub for the next year. Reports in Geo News and A Sports put the value of the compensation and facilities at up to USD 200,000, or around Rs 5.6 crore.
The settlement ends a standoff that began earlier this week, when the PCB told the league it would withhold NOCs unless it was paid USD 10,000 for every certificate it issued. With 16 Pakistani players picked in the draft, that demand was worth USD 160,000 in total.
ESPNcricinfo reported that the payment agreed in the end is understood to be less than the board's initial demand, and quoted one official as saying the PCB regarded the new arrangement as more beneficial for Pakistan cricket than the cash compensation it had originally sought. The facilities access in Abu Dhabi appears to have been a significant part of that calculation.
The dispute had an unusually long fuse. The Abu Dhabi T10 management submitted NOC applications for the Pakistani players shortly after the player draft on 30 September, but the PCB only communicated its USD 10,000-per-player demand at the beginning of this week, days before the tournament was due to start. That left franchises with little time either to meet the demand or to find replacement players.
The 16 players were spread across five of the tournament's six franchises in the draft. Naseem Shah was picked by Royal Desert Champions, while UAE Bulls took Shadab Khan, Mohammad Amir, Khawaja Nafay, Khushdil Shah, Azam Khan and Mohammad Wasim Jr. United Tigers signed Fakhar Zaman, Iftikhar Ahmed, Faheem Ashraf, Sufyan Muqeem and Abbas Afridi; Emirates Eagles took Hasan Nawaz, Akif Javed and Ali Raza; and Salman Irshad joined Arabian Aces.
Several of the players are among Pakistan's most recognisable white-ball names, and the uncertainty had threatened to leave franchises without some of their headline signings. Reports during the week said some cricketers had even been prepared to pay the USD 10,000 fee from their own salaries if their franchises declined to cover it.
The PCB has not issued an official public statement on the agreement so far, and the reporting rests on sources at the board and the league. Confirmation that each individual NOC has actually been issued had also not been provided at the time the deal was reported, so the final paperwork for individual players is still something to watch as the tournament gets under way.
The Abu Dhabi T10 runs from 7 to 20 November, with six teams playing the 10-over format across two weeks. The timing overlaps with Pakistan's home Test series against Sri Lanka, which begins in Rawalpindi on 9 November, adding another layer of scheduling pressure around the players involved. For the league, though, the immediate worry is over: its Pakistani contingent, one of the biggest national groups in the draft, can now take the field when the tournament opens.
