Tambe had not taken clearance for tournament.
AB Wire
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NEW YORK: The Rajasthan Royals leg-spinner Pravin Tambe, who created a sensation coming into the franchise, and who has also played for Mumbai in the Ranji Trophy, is in trouble for playing alongside the banned Bangladesh cricket player Mohammad Ashraful, in a T20 tournament held in New Jersey.
Ashraful is currently serving a five-year ban imposed on him by the Bangladesh Cricket Board for his role in fixing during the 2013 Bangladesh Premier League. And Tambe may have to pay a heavy price for the act of playing with him, going by a report in ESPNCricInfo.
The Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA), the governing body for cricket for Tambe’s state team in India, said the player had not sought permission to participate in the tournament and it was unaware of his involvement. When contacted by ESPN Cricinfo for a response, Tambe said he had been unaware that it was an official tournament and that he did not know of Ashraful’s involvement in it until he took the field for a game.
Apart from Tambe, Bangladesh internationals Elias Sunny and Nadif Chowdhury, who are contracted first-class cricketers with the Bangladesh Cricket Board, and other Bangladeshi players also played with Ashraful in a T20 tournament in the USA.
An ICC spokesperson said he would revert once he had more information, when asked whether the players had violated any code of conduct by playing alongside or against a banned player. Officials from the BCB and MCA also responded in a similar manner.
The website of Laurel Hill Cricket, a T20 tournament in New Jersey, mentions Tambe and Royal Challengers Bangalore bowler Harshal Patel as attractions in the competition, though Patel has not participated in any of the games and has actually been playing a tournament in India during this time, the report said.
Tambe, however, played with Ashraful for South Gujarat CC Jrs against Bulls on July 27. As Tambe does not have a BCCI contract, he had to obtain clearances from the MCA, but the association’s joint-secretary Dr PV Shetty confirmed Tambe had not sought a no-objection certificate. The BCCI did not reply to an email asking for a comment.
Tambe told ESPNcricinfo that he had been in New York between July 23 and 31 to visit friends but had no idea that the cricket he was playing was a competitive tournament or that his name had featured on Laurel Hill Cricket website.
“I had no idea it was an official tournament,” he said. “I had just gone there to visit my friends in the US for a week of holidays and I was enjoying. I did not even have a kit with me.”
Tambe said he played a match for Holmdel CC on July 26 and his friends on the team said they were going to play a practice game the next day. He went along to play on July 27 and said that only when entering the field did he take notice of Ashraful’s presence.
“I was told it was a practice match. When I went to the ground I realised it was Twenty20 match,” Tambe said. “Till I went into the ground and stood at my fielding position I had no clue that he [Ashraful] was also playing. Even my friends did not know. They were told that some other friend had got him.”
When asked why he did not pull out from the match as soon as he spotted Ashraful, Tambe said he found himself in a helpless position. “I did not know he was also playing. And I just went there to play a simple game of cricket with my close friends. I told my friends and the organizers I would not like to play in any other game after the incident.”
Some of the other players who participated in the Michigan and Laurel Hill Cricket tournaments were Farveez Maharoof (Sri Lanka), Xavier Marshall (West Indies) and John Campbell (Jamaica); Fahad Babar, Akeem Dodson, Jasdeep Singh, Durale Forrest, George Adams and Muhammad Ghous (USA), Rizwan Cheema, Ruvindu Gunasekera, Navneet Dhaliwal, Satsimranjit Singh Dhindsa and Saad Bin Zafar (Canada).