Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chairman Nasim Ashraf has been invited to Australia for high level talks with Cricket Australia (CA) to re-schedule the April tour postponed last week.

CA chairman Creagh O’Connor extended the invite today as a way of confirming Australia’s commitment to fulfilling their tour obligations despite withdrawing from next month’s scheduled visit to Pakistan due to security concerns.

O’Connor said it had become clear to him that further in-depth talks were required to find a place and time for the series amid a cramped international schedule sure to be compressed further by the rise of the cashed up Indian Twenty20 Premier League.

Ashraf is also keen to speak with security advisers and officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to gain a better understanding of why CA abandoned the tour.

“Dr Ashraf and I have taken the opportunity to catch up during the current International Cricket Council board meeting in Dubai and we have had a preliminary look at dates which might be suitable to reschedule the matches,” O’Connor said from Dubai today.

“It is clear from our initial discussion here in Dubai that we need to sit down and go through the technical issues on finding new dates with a fine tooth comb.

“To that end, I have suggested we meet in Melbourne as soon as possible and we will organise dates once the current ICC meetings are finalised.”

O’Connor and Ashraf have both been in Dubai for ICC meetings that also settled on South African television executive Imtiaz Patel as the next chief executive of the ICC, replacing Australian Malcolm Speed.

Patel had been in line to take over from Dr Ali Bacher as South African cricket’s supremo in the late 1990s but instead moved sideways to pay television network SuperSport where he was to become chief executive.

© AAP 2012

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