Cricket: whose fault is it?

On the surface, it seems that Pakistan’s cricket chiefs are leaving no stone unturned in their campaign to punish the culprits of the country’s humiliating exit from the ICC World Twenty20 championship in India. Captain Shahid Afridi and head coach Waqar Younis announced they were stepping down in the aftermath of the World T20 debacle – and the PCB decided to happily let them go. The board, in fact, wasted little time in appointing wicketkeeper-batsman Sarfraz Ahmed as Pakistan’s new T20 captain and began its hunt to find Waqar’s successor. It sacked the national selection committee over its failure to pick a better combination. The board has also announced other measures like appointing a psychologist and a dietician and holding a boot camp to help improve player fitness. Other more long-term reforms announced by the PCB include a re-evaluation of its elite National Cricket Academy and revamping of the first-class competitions. All this is well and good, but the problem is that the PCB has tried and failed in the very measures that it has recently announced in a bid to lift Pakistan cricket. Time and again it has changed selectors, coaches captains but without much success. It has also hired psychologists and dieticians with an aim to help the national players become mentally and physically fitter. All that didn’t really work in the past and there are no guarantees that such superficial steps will achieve much this time either. Boot camps are not a new thing either as the PCB has in the past carried out such exercises as well in collaboration with Pakistan army trainers.

Instead of just relying on cosmetic surgery, the PCB should dig deeper. That’s a tough thing to do considering that it would unearth what critics have been saying all along: the fault is within the board itself and unless that is rectified no steps it takes are going to work. Much has changed since the halcyon days of Pakistan cricket when men like the late Nur Khan called the shots in the PCB. Today, officials at the helm of the board are more concerned about saving their own jobs than anything else. Unless the PCB does some soul-searching and looks for shortcomings within, it will never be in a position to right the wrongs that have been hampering our cricket. And that is why what needs to be done is a complete overhauling of Pakistan cricket. But for that to happen, first the Pakistan Cricket Board needs an overhaul. Over the years Pakistan has experienced a massive decline in its sporting fortunes with our performance in games like hockey and squash, in which the country was once regarded as a superpower, hitting rock bottom. It might sound a bit of an overstatement but there are genuine fears that cricket is moving in that direction. If we are not careful, Pakistan cricket, too, could become a story of failure.