INWhen team coach Jason Gillespie described the upcoming Test series against England as a “momentous occasion for Pakistan cricket”, he was not exaggerating. The players will gather in Multan on Monday, desperate not only to win three cricket matches but also to get rid of the stench of chaos and crisis that hangs over them with ever-increasing acuteness.
Pakistan have won three of the last 17 Tests and if they draw this series, they will go the entire three calendar years without beating anyone except Sri Lanka. After a 2-0 defeat at home to Bangladesh this month – which was their second-ever home series defeat in the last two years, the second coming on England’s last visit – they dropped to eighth in the ICC Test Rankings, their lowest place since 1965. They were eliminated from the last 50-over and T20 World Cups in the group stage, suffering a humiliating defeat to the USA in the latter.
As of 2022, the Pakistan Cricket Board has three chairmen and the Test side has as many captains, as well as six permanent or interim head coaches. Shaheen Shah Afridi replaced Babar Azam as the T20 captain in November last year and was demoted again after one series and four months later.
The PCB is headed by Mohsin Naqvi, also the country’s interior minister, and some rather pointed questions were asked in parliament about the merits of his appointment. “The favorites have been told to play technical sports like cricket. What are Mohsin Naqvi’s qualifications?” asked Imran Khan, the imprisoned former cricket captain and prime minister, in August. “Nations are destroyed when corrupt and incompetent people are placed in positions of power in state institutions.”
After this year’s T20 World Cup, Naqvi warned that “the team needed major surgery”, but in the end it was only slightly trimmed, apparently because there was no one better to choose from. “We don’t have any pool of players to draw from,” he said, adding that “the whole system [is] mess”.
It has launched three new national tournaments in which squads for the One-Day Champions Cup, which ends on Sunday, will be selected “80% by artificial intelligence and 20% by humans.” This event delayed the start of the Test team’s preparations for the England competition and means that the team will go into it with a host of freshly strengthened but largely irrelevant white-ball skills. This is reminiscent of the astute observation of Shan Masood, their captain, after their defeat against Bangladesh: ‘You can’t prepare for science and then take the maths exam. If you are tested in math, study math.
After poor performances and growing resentment this month, the PCB organized a ‘connection camp’ where administrators, coaches and senior players gathered to talk about a clean atmosphere. “Everyone feels that the performance of the players and management can be better,” said Salman Naseer, the organization’s CEO.
“The idea was to sit down together, identify the problems and identify what could be improved. What is our vision and how to achieve it? We openly and honestly accept and identify [problems] and demand commitment from each other, demand it in terms of how we can improve our performance and how we can work together as a team. Our unanimous opinion was that we must solve this problem and determine how to do it.”
In other words, they both definitely need to change and have no idea what that looks like. Meanwhile, the Test team continues under Masood, who has led Pakistan five times – three in Australia last winter and two at home to Bangladesh – and lost heavily. The squad for the first Test against England was announced on Tuesday, with a few changes. “We don’t want to have a knee-jerk reaction to every bad result. We want to show faith in these players because they are very good players,” Gillespie said.
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Kamran Ghulam and Mohammad Ali were two members of the squad that were to be dropped from the Bangladesh series. This caused such outrage that within 24 hours both were called up as additional, non-roster “substitute players”.
One of the changes Masood has encouraged is his team’s approach with the bat. In the first innings of the first match in Australia, the hosts scored 69 more wickets, but scored 216 more runs, which ultimately decided the fate of the match. “If you score goals at a much slower rate than your opponent, you will be far behind in the game,” he said. “We bowled 100 overs and they bowled 110. It’s not a huge difference, but the scoring rate has set us back significantly. Our aim is to hopefully bat at a faster pace and a decent number of overs.”
It’s a familiar ambition for England fans, but Pakistan has yet to achieve full or even partial Bazball. All four of their games rank among the teams’ top 11 performances over the last five years when ranked by runs per wicket, but even over that period they average 3.50 to the 4.57 that England achieved under Brendon McCullum .
England were in a sorry state when the New Zealander was appointed in May 2022, proving that with a positive vision and the right leadership, even the most passionate fans can quickly bounce back. In this way, Pakistan’s opponents, when the series begins next Monday, will provide them with hope while trying to suppress it.
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