Scotland hoping for quick visa assurances for Sharif as they hope to avoid delays amid short turnaround to start of tournament.
Cricket The ICC is working “very, very hard” to guarantee that Scotland’s players, notably fast bowler Safyaan Sharif, who has Pakistani ancestry, will be granted Indian visas in time for their debut T20 World Cup match on February 7.
As the top-ranked side that had not yet qualified for the World Cup, Scotland benefited from Bangladesh’s last-minute withdrawal. On Monday afternoon, they announced a 15-man squad that will go to India later this week.
In recent years, Pakistani nationals or individuals with Pakistani ancestry, including a number of cricket players, have had frequent delays when applying for Indian visas due to the political and diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan.
However, Cricket Scotland is optimistic that Sharif, who was born in Huddersfield to a Pakistani father and a British-Pakistani mother before relocating to Scotland at the age of seven, will receive a visa in time for the team’s first game in Kolkata against the West Indies.
“We are all committed [to] working with the ICC to make that happen,” Trudy Lindblade, Cricket Scotland’s chief executive, said on Monday. “The visa piece is always slightly an unknown, and it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got three days or whether you’ve got 45 days.
“Certainly that’s been our focus in the last 48 hours: just getting those visas done so our players are all ready to go. They’re all in the middle of submitting their visas and we will be there on the ground in India as quickly as we can, so it’s just a matter of time now.
“[The ICC] can only give us the assurances of the bits that they can control and, absolutely, of the bits that they control, we are working with them and obviously they’re working with the BCCI and local people on the ground there to make sure that we are getting all of that support that we need.
“So, absolutely, [they have given] the assurance that they can provide of things that were in their control. There is a team working very, very hard to not just help us, but to help 19 other teams as well that are also going to a World Cup. But we are their intense focus right now.”