Every class has a kid who forgets the lesson when the going gets tough or when the teacher is replaced with someone else.

Pakistan cricket team is that same kid who one day beats the best team in the world but the next day loses unexpectedly to the same team. Former English captain Michael Vaughan calls it suspicious batting; we Pakistanis call it the way we play cricket. Sometimes we win matches but most of the time, we don’t.

The recently concluded series between Pakistan and England showed that when they set their mind to it, the Pakistani players can both win and lose a cricket match. They won the first match convincingly and everybody hailed the great team work which was nowhere in the next two matches. In fact, the team combination was so idiotic that anyone with a little know how of the game would have pointed out the issues. But coach Waqar Younis didn’t even think there was an issue to discuss!

Not many people have issues with Ahmed Shehzad’s being on the bench; the problem is the replacement. Mohammad Hafeez is the best opener in the team and using him at number 3 should only be a stop-gap experiment; something to facilitate captain Azhar Ali who wants to make the opening slot his very own.

If Ahmed Shehzad isn’t playing then who should be the one opening the batting with Azhar Ali… Mohammad Hafeez, right? Not for coach Waqar Younis who tried Bilal Asif and Babar Azam in the slot; the latter scored a half century in the first ODI batting down the order. They not only shook the confidence of the youngster but also told the English side that they weren’t interested in winning matches as settling private scores and disciplining players was more important for them.

Talking of discipline, every batsman in the world loves to score runs but we Pakistanis love it so much that we end up getting run out. Mohammad Hafeez goes the Inzamam-ul-Haq way when he is on the pitch because every time there is a run out, he is either the person who ran his partner out or who ran himself out. Is he a newbie who doesn’t know how things work on the international arena? Does he deliberately run his partner out so that he can score runs and win matches? I think it’s neither because just like he doesn’t have control over his form he doesn’t have control over his ‘calling’. He should play a few matches with school kids to improve his calling because the youngsters will not listen to him and save their own wicket unlike his teammates who close their eyes and commit cricket suicide while running with him.

Had aliens descended on Earth and saw the Pakistan team batting in the third one-dayer, they might have thought that the end of the planet was near and the Pakistani batsmen were trying to score as many runs as possible before the Apocalypse. Every player wanted to hit a six ala Javed Miandad at Sharjah but unlike the famous six nearly three decades back, these landed in the hands of the fielders. Isn’t there any plan that is explained to the batsmen before they go out to bat? Aren’t the players told that setting small targets would help them take the score past 250 and that is better than scoring 207! What is the coach and his army doing in the dressing room? Is it time Pakistan experimented with different coaches in different formats and kept Waqar Younis around in Tests and axed him from ODI and T20.

And then there is the team’s fielding which is good but in patches. They don’t hit the wicket directly and the opponents are carefree when they run between the wickets because they know that the prospect of a fielder in green hitting the wicket directly is as good as none. Add to it the insane batting lineup and you get a team that doesn’t want to win even if the other team is willing to lose. All problems will be solved if Mohammad Hafeez is asked to bat as an opener, Shoaib Malik is used as the number 3, Babar Azam at number 4, Iftikhar at number 5, Sarfaraz and Rizwan at number 6 and 7, and Anwar Ali at number 8 with one spinner and two pacers coming in next.

There is a reason why the Men In Green are at the number 8 in the ICC ODI Ranking. They don’t have any idea how to plot the downfall of the opposing team. Teams who aren’t winning matches or players’ who aren’t going through the best of forms always perform against Pakistan and that’s because there is no team in Pakistan.

The Misbah-less ODI squad has failed miserably and has now lost 10 out of their last 15 ODIs at UAE, with occasional victories hiding the problem temporarily. Every cricketer in the Playing XI seems to be playing for himself and if that continues, there will be a time when like the hockey team (God forbid) Pakistan will have to play the qualifying stage to stay in the mega events.