The Pakistani national cricket team, currently touring New Zealand for warm-up matches ahead of the Cricket World Cup, said today they cannot rule out the possibility that a ghost has tampered with “one or more balls,” after it emerged that all the team’s balls were present with player Haris Sohail when he had a supernatural experience in a Christchurch hotel.
Sohail complained to staff at the Rydges Latimer hotel that he had been shaken and then pushed by what he described as a ghost, and had requested a room change.
The team’s coach, Waqar Younis, said Sohail had been “traumatised” by the event, and has been unable to play with the team since.
He also warned that it was “possible” that the supernatural presence may have tampered with at least one of the more than 40 balls present with Sohail in his hotel room.
Asked what all the team’s balls were doing in the room, Younis replied “Sleeping.”
“We have checked the balls over, and physically, they are fine,” he said. “But it would not surprise me, and I just want to prepare people, for the fact that, you know, there may have been some kind of non-physical, supernatural tampering that, in all likelihood, would benefit us greatly.”
He said he had looked it up on the internet, and that it was “apparently true” that “ghosts do that sort of thing, actually all the time.”
Younis himself was accused of ball tampering at the 1992 world cup, when he was the victim of a rogue gorilla, who repeatedly wandered onto the field and scuffed the ball while nobody but him was looking.