Younis Khan’s controversial decision to walk away from the Pakistan Cup in Faisalabad last week drew strong criticism from various quarters and rightly so. Later, Pakistan Cricket Board’s erratic behavior as it first snubbed Younis despite his apologetic stance and later embraced the former Test captain after making a u-turn, also drew flak from the critics and not without reason.

But perhaps something more important got lost somewhere between Younis’s trigger-happy nature and the confused minds at the helm of Pakistan cricket. Though unfortunate, the Younis Khan incident provided Pakistan’s cricket fraternity an opportunity to carry out close scrutiny of sub-standard umpiring that mars domestic competitions including our premier first-class tournaments.

Younis is not the first player to complain about it and he won’t certainly be the last. Time and again, one gets to hear stories of awful and sometimes biased umpiring at the domestic level. What I have seen and heard about the Younis incident, it is clear that poor umpiring did play its role in triggering the controversy in the first place.

I’m not suggesting that Younis was right in deserting his team after getting a raw deal from the umpires. As a senior player who has been representing Pakistan for years, he should have known that there are other, more acceptable ways to lodge your protest than packing your bags and flying out mid way during a major national tournament. He was captaining Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and having made a false start, his team needed their skipper. In the absence of Younis, the team did bounce back under the captaincy of Ahmed Shehzad to qualify for the final but that’s beside the point. The point is that Younis chose to walk away when his team needed him most and that’s something which has only added to his unpredictable personality.

His decision to withdraw from the Pakistan Cup was very much a disservice to his team but Younis has managed to highlight a very disturbing element that has ruined our domestic cricket for too long. You just can’t have a high quality cricket tournament without adding the element of decent umpiring to it. Nobody is asking for flawless umpiring because that’s next to impossible but even decent umpiring would do. That’s where the umpire is mostly right and shows no bias to any particular team or player.

However, more often than not you get to see umpiring howlers even at the leading first-class tournaments. I’m talking about the events which are televised live. Can you imagine what sort of umpiring goes on the numerous domestic tournaments that are not covered on TV?

There is this story about a top Pakistani batsman who was struggling for runs at the domestic level some years ago. He needed to play a big knock in order to regain his place in the national side. He managed to score a timely double century in a first-class tournament and instantly earned the selectors’ nod. They say he survived at least five close calls during the innings. "Three of them were clearly out, you could tell that from a 100 yards away but the umpires didn’t think so," a player whose team was on the receiving end of the episode told me. "It happens all the time," he lamented.

So who’s going to put a stop to such malpractices? It’s primarily the Board’s job at least for the tournaments that it organises.

It’s important that the PCB starts dealing with the issue of umpiring on a priority basis because you cannot improve the standard of your domestic games without doing that.

The problem is that umpiring is just one of the many ills that dog domestic cricket in Pakistan. The infra-structure needs improvement, the pitches need to be upgraded and the list goes on.

What the Board must do is revamp our domestic structure. It certainly is a sweeping demand. Revamping our domestic cricket is going to be a gigantic exercise that will require time, money and above all the will to do it.

Over the years, one board chairman after another has promised to fix domestic cricket but there was seldom any follow through. Many of them did try but were either incapable or unwilling to go for such a long-term goal.

Sometimes I don’t blame them. After all, we are not a people that think long term. We like to do things that can help us reap instant rewards. Even if a PCB set-up starts taking long-term steps to improve our cricket will many of us have the patience to wait for five or maybe ten years to see full results? Or will a new set-up that will succeed the previous one show any belief in continuity?

But most of the time I do blame them. After all, isn’t that the reason why they are the there in the first place? What do they think is their job, the job of the PCB chiefs? Isn’t it the promotion and development of cricket in the country? You can’t develop cricket in Pakistan unless you develop our domestic structure.

I think almost seven years ago, I wrote a piece on these pages on why Ijaz Butt, the then PCB chairman, should be asked to quit.

Of the ten reasons I gave, one simply stated that he wasn’t the right man for the job.

I wrote: "In Godfather, Don Corleoni removed Tom Hagen as his chief adviser when it was time to battle against rival mafia gangs because he was not a ‘wartime consiglieri’. President Asif Zardari -- PCB’s chief patron -- should also look for a competent individual who is capable of running Pakistan cricket in a professional manner. Butt may be an ex-cricketer, an experienced administrator and a well-connected man, but he is far from the sort of PCB chief Pakistan cricket needs at the moment. In the first seven months of his stint, he has failed on so many fronts to be allowed to continue. What the PCB needs is a chief who has the will and qualities to pick up the pieces. He should have the sort of vision needed to rejuvenate Pakistan cricket because things cannot be allowed to go on like the way they are. Our cricket is going through a serious turmoil and with Butt at helm, the future seems to be bleaker."

Well, Butt was soon showed the door but did his exit really change anything?