National Sports Council (NSC), the country’s supreme sports governing body, on Monday said it is ready to solve the existing crisis in the Cricket Association of Nepal (CAN).

The International Cricket Council (ICC) on April 25 had suspended CAN due to a “leadership vacuum” caused by a dual existence of the cricket governing body and a pending court case. NSC had formed CAN ad-hoc committee under Ramesh Silwal on January 7 after refusing to recognise the elected body led by Chatur Bahadur Chand, claiming the elections on December 15 was held without completing due procedures.

The Chand-led CAN then moved the Supreme Court challenging the NSC decision with the verdict still pending. Amidst the apprehensive circumstance, ICC organised Nepal’s ICC World Cricket League Championship home matches against Namibia on April 16 and 18 with its direct involvement before its board decided to suspend CAN’s membership.

Member Secretary Keshav Bista said, as the guardian of Nepali sports, NSC is ready to solve the crisis beginning from the scratch. “The court case is still pending so NSC cannot scrap the ad-hoc committee. The only option is if they (elected body) withdraw their case from the Supreme Court, we can start from the beginning,” said Bista.

“Once the court case is withdrawn, the ad-hoc committee will be scrapped and we can form a new body by including members of both the committees. We can also include individuals who were not able to fit in both committees,” added Bista.

The elected committee on April 29 had said it was ready to get flexible to solve the ongoing crisis if the government or NSC come up with a concrete solution. The committee had also blamed NSC for creating the crisis by forming a parallel body and the blame-game continued on Monday.

“We want to make it clear that NSC has played no role in the suspension of CAN as it has been claimed. We cannot legitimize any committee which forcefully holds the elections without consent from the NSC and has not completed any procedure. The committee that moved the court challenging our decision is more responsible for the suspension,” claimed Bista.

The member secretary also came up with another option if the first one does not work. “If the first option is not acceptable then we can form a normalisation committee which will be tasked to hold fresh elections. The committee from the fresh elections will lead the cricket governing body,” added Bista.