As Nasser Hussain interviewed Wahab Riaz, the winner of the man-of-the-match award following Pakistan’s crushing victory over England in their one and only T20 encounter, the last match of Pakistan’s 2016 tour of England, Hussain concluded by saying that it had been a pleasure to have this Pakistan side in England.

That is not the sort of sentiment with which Pakistani tours to the UK have usually concluded.

The 1992 tour ended in a haze of controversy over ball tampering, the 2006 tour with the fiasco at the Oval where Pakistan became the first country ever to forfeit a Test match, and the 2010 tour ended with three of the Pakistani players, including their captain, in jail.

It was not just that, throughout this tour Pakistan played good cricket and performed much better than even their most ardent supporters expected them to. The tour started off with a huge surprise as Pakistan won the first Test at Lord’s.

The next two Tests were lost by big margins and just when the pundits were writing the tourists off, they came back with a magnificent performance at The Oval, outclassing England in all three departments of the game to square the Test series at 2-2.

The ODI series did not go well and Pakistan could only manage a consolation victory in the fifth game after going down by a fair margin in the first four.

That said, it was a big effort to win the fifth game after heavy setbacks in the previous games, from a team which is ranked only above Afghanistan in the ICC’s top ten ODI rankings.

If I have a criticism to make at all, it would be that perhaps Pakistan has given too much importance to the horses for courses philosophy by selecting very different ODI and Test sides.

That win gave them the confidence to annihilate England in the lone T20 clash and thus finish the tour on a high. The team was led excellently in the T20 game by Sarfraz Ahmed, who is obviously going to be there to serve Pakistan cricket for a long time to come.

Over the course of this tour I think it would be fair to say that one can discern the nucleus of a Pakistani side for the future.

Misbah-ul-Haq has been a great captain and much of the credit for making this tour a success must go to him; and Younis has been, quite simply, one of the greatest batsmen that Pakistan has ever produced. But they cannot go on forever.

They have both acquired a cricketing status wherein they should themselves decide when it is time for them, but it seems that after the success of the England tour, there is no cause for panic over what will happen when they go.

We have a strong nucleus of a Test side that is more than good enough to take Pakistan into the future and that nucleus would consist of Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq, Sarfraz Ahmed, Wahab Riaz and Yasir Shah.

There is every reason to hope that youngsters like Imad Wasim, Babar Azam and Hassan Ali will also be part of this nucleus in the very near future and that Sami Aslam will be able to prove that he too deserves his place in there.

If I have a criticism to make at all, it would be that perhaps Pakistan has given too much importance to the horses for courses philosophy by selecting very different ODI and Test sides.

Thus Imad Wasim, Babar Azam, Hassan Ali and Mohammad Nawaz should, I feel, not be restricted to the ODI arena but given a chance to prove themselves at the Test level too. I see no reason why they should not succeed in the longer format of the game.

On the other hand, an explosive batsman like Sharjeel Khan is obviously best suited for white ball cricket. He is an explosive talent and if groomed properly, should be an asset for Pakistan cricket.

In Umar Akmal too, Pakistan have another explosive talent who on merit alone would certainly find his place in the ODI and T20 sides.

Pakistan’s cricket administrators have decided to keep his alleged misdemeanours to themselves, so I cannot comment on whether his exclusion from the Pakistan squad is justified, although I have no reason to believe that he would have been excluded unless it was necessary.

It should be up to the manager, captain, coach and senior PCB officials to ensure that Akmal falls in line. However, if he proves incapable of doing so, it would perhaps be best to keep him out as a disruptive element in the dressing room, no matter how talented, can have a net negative effect on the team.

After all, the T20 side did well enough without him against England who, at least on paper, are perhaps the best T20 side in the world at the moment altbeit that this is not reflected in the ICC’s T20 rankings.

If there is one aspect of Pakistan’s cricket that needs special attention, it is ODI cricket.

As their coach Mickey Arthur said, they still seem to be playing their ODI cricket in the 90s when you tried to keep wickets in tact till the 40th over or so and then let loose a blitz hoping that you could post a score of 260 or thereabouts.

In those days, that was a good score, but the bar has gone up considerably since then and these days you need in excess of 300 if you are to give your bowlers a reasonable chance. You therefore need more players who are big stroke players and who can get going more or less from the word ‘go’.

That shift in style and method will take some time to accomplish and Mickey Arthur, who seems to be well aware of the problem, should be given all the support he needs without interference from any quarter.

Perhaps most important of all, the tour was a great success off the field as well, with no untoward incidents being reported.

Misbah-ul-Haq has been a great captain and much of the credit for making this tour a success must go to him.

There were some incidents of bad behaviour on the field but they all came from the England side, some of whose players would be well advised to take lessons on good behaviour from their Pakistani counterparts.

But in creating this new image of Pakistan cricket, I think some TV commentators also played a leading role and the most prominent among them were Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton, ably supported by Shane Warne and Michael Holding.

Pakistan’s cricket authorities would be well advised to ensure good relations with them and other sympathetic journalists. But the real credit goes to Pakistan’s three captains — Misbah, Azhar and Sarfraz — and to the team who played with fervour, giving their all but did it always with a smile on their lips.

They deserve full marks and so does the team’s tour management, consisting of Intikhab Alam and Mickey Arthur.

When things do not go well the management gets crucified, but this was one instance in which things went very well and that is not possible unless the atmosphere in the dressing room is positive and focussed.

For being able to achieve this, both Intikhab and Arthur deserve full praise; Arthur had media exposure during the tour but Intikhab went about his work quietly and largely unnoticed.

For that matter, his contribution was no less valuable and if this management team continues to click as it did in England — with each other and the team — the future should be bright.

The writer is a former Pakistan captain

Published in Dawn, September 10th, 2016