Cricket is the most popular sport in Pakistan. The country has won many titles such as 1992 ODI World Cup under the captaincy of Imran Khan, 2009 T20I World Cup against Sri Lanka and Champions Trophy in 2017 (which was our last ICC trophy in the last many years).
Pakistan is considered a land of superstars. Pakistan produced the likes of Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Saeed Anwar, Shoaib Akhtar, Shahid Afridi and if we look in current times, Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi, Mohammad Rizwan and several others.
But we have witnessed in the last couple of years that we are lagging in many areas of the game. We failed in many tournaments of ICC and ACC. We lost to Afghanistan in CWC 2023, USA in the recent T20 WC etc.
What are the reasons that we have been exposed in major tournaments and continuously struggling in the same areas of the game?
The first and foremost reason of the failure is the selection of national team. We are consistently selecting the team on the basis of performances in Pakistan Super League and ignore the players of domestic circuit.
The players are mostly selected in the national team on their single performance in the league. Many players were selected in the recent edition of T20 World Cup on the performances of CPL (Caribbean Premier League).
Despite having talent and skills, they consistently failed to deliver. The players who were selected from the performances of leagues didn’t perform at the highest level.
If we look at the domestic system of our neighbourhood India, they prefer the players who perform at the grass-root cricket. Australia and England also prefer those players who perform in List A and first class cricket. They didn’t select the players on the performances of the leagues.
Many Australian and English players showed their talent in the franchise cricket such as IPL (Indian Premier League), BBL (Big Bash League), and ILT (International League T20). But they never got selected in the national team.
Our selection committee seems to get under pressure of the social media. The social media highlights the single innings and starts new trends in the favour of the player.
In other words, the selection committee appointed those players who have good “PR”. But good PR never decides the outcome of the matches. We failed to keep our middle-order alive after the retirement of Muhammad Hafeez and Shoaib Malik.
When a player retires or is ousted from a certain position, there should be successors. Unfortunately, we tried our all openers across the formats of T20 and ODI, which weakened Pakistan cricket. We are still in search of proper players who can bat at numbers 4, 5, 6 and 7.
These issues can be resolved by promoting the first and list A cricket.
The other failure is that of captaincy. When the PCB announced the new captain for the white ball format, Shaheen Afridi, that was a wrong decision. The captain should have been a senior and more experienced player.
The decision was based on his performance as a captain for Lahore Qalandars.
But removing him as a captain was the biggest mistake of PCB. Because everything needs time and removing after his failure in one and only series against New Zealand was disgusting. That was not a brave decision. But again the decision-makers continued the chain of blunders and re-appointed Babar Azam as a replacement of Shaheen Afridi.
Here Babar should have supported Shaheen and declined the offer of captaincy but he didn’t.
Now, the PCB is in the mood of “major surgery”. Yes, a surgery was needed, but not blunders. Now, it’s time for bold decisions because next year we are hosting Champions Trophy at home.
It’s time to hunt like “Shaheen” and prove Naseer Hussain right again as he had said in Oval: “Pakistan cricket at its best: one minute down, next minute up.”
