When the imminent Test series against England was described as “a momentous occasion for Pakistan cricket” by the team’s coach, Jason Gillespie, he was not being hyperbolic. The players will gather in Multan on Monday desperate not just to win three games of cricket, but to cast off the stench of chaos and crisis that is hanging over them with ever-increasing pungency.
Pakistan have won three of their past 17 Tests and if they draw a blank in this series will have gone three full calendar years without beating anyone except Sri Lanka. After losing 2-0 at home to Bangladesh this month – the second home series whitewash of their history and of the past two years, the other coming when England last visited – they slipped to eighth in the ICC’s Test rankings, their lowest position since 1965. They were knocked out of the most recent 50-over and T20 World Cups in the group stage, suffering a humiliating defeat by the USA in the latter.
Since 2022 the Pakistan Cricket Board has had three chairmen and the Test side as many captains, as well as six permanent or temporary head coaches. Shaheen Shah Afridi replaced Babar Azam as captain of the T20 team last November and was demoted again one series and four months later.
The PCB is led by Mohsin Naqvi, also the country’s interior minister, and rather blunt questions have been asked in parliament about the wisdom of his appointment. “Favourites have been imposed to run a technical sport 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 into positions of power in state institutions.”
After this year’s T20 World Cup Naqvi warned that “the team needs major surgery”, but it has ended up getting just a gentle pruning, apparently because there wasn’t anyone better to pick. “We don’t have any player pool which we can draw from,” he said, adding that “the whole system [is] a mess”.
He has launched three new domestic tournaments, with squads for the Champions One-day Cup, which ends on Sunday, selected “80% by AI and 20% using humans”. That event has delayed the start of the Test team’s preparations for the England series and means they will go into it with an array of freshly buffed but largely irrelevant white-ball skills. This calls to mind the cutting observation delivered by Shan Masood, their captain, after defeat by Bangladesh: “You can’t prepare for science and then sit a maths exam. If you’re being tested for maths, you study maths.”
After poor performances and swelling rancour this month the PCB held a “connection camp”, bringing together administrators, coaches and senior players for clear-the-air talks. “Everyone is feeling that the performances of players, and management, can be better,” said Salman Naseer, the organisation’s chief executive.
“The idea was to sit together, identify issues and what can be better. What is our vision and how do we get there? We openly and candidly accept and identify [problems] and ask for a commitment from each other, demand it, on how we can improve our performances and how we can work together as a team. Our unanimous view was that we need to resolve this and need to identify how we do it.”
In other words, they both definitely require change and have no idea what it looks like. In the meantime the Test team continues under Masood, who has led Pakistan five times – three games in Australia last winter and the two at home to Bangladesh – and lost the lot. The squad for the first Test against England was announced on Tuesday, with few changes. “We don’t want to have kneejerk reactions to every bad result. We want to show faith and belief in these players because they’re very good players,” Gillespie said.
after newsletter promotion
Kamran Ghulam and Mohammad Ali were the two members of the squad for the Bangladesh series to be dropped. It caused such an outcry that within 24 hours both had been called up as additional, off-site, “reserve players”.
One of the changes Masood has encouraged is his team’s attitude with the bat. In the first innings of their opening game in Australia the hosts faced 69 more deliveries but scored 216 more runs, in effect deciding the match. “If you score at a significantly lower rate than your opposition then you’ll be way behind in the game,” he said. “We batted 100 overs and they batted 110. That’s not much of a difference but the scoring rate set us back quite a bit. Our target is to hopefully bat at a quicker rate and a decent amount of overs too.”
For England fans this is a familiar ambition, but Pakistan are yet to go full, or even partial, Bazball. Their four subsequent matches are all in the top 11 of the teams’ performances in the past five years if ranked by runs per over, but even in this period they are averaging 3.50 to the 4.57 England have managed under Brendon McCullum.
England had been in sorry state when the New Zealander was appointed in May 2022 and are proof that with a positive vision and the right leadership even deep funks can clear quickly. Pakistan’s opponents when the series starts next Monday will thus provide them with hope, while also seeking to snuff it out.
