On and off the field, this is a fairly low moment in Pakistan cricket. Below-par performances in back-to-back multilateral tournaments — on talent, we should have reached at least the final of the Asia Cup and the semis of the World Cup — as well as a predictable 3-0 loss in Australia, albeit one that showed some green shoots, reflect chaos behind the scenes.

Ask anyone in or around Pakistan cricketing circles, and they will decry the Zaka Ashraf administration as the worst in decades. Indeed, on a recent episode of the intrepid Batta Fast podcast, Osman Samiuddin favourably compared the Ijaz Butt era to Zaka’s, which is really saying something.

Zaka began his tenure by destabilising the team management, looking to fire Mickey Arthur and Grant Bradburn even though they had only just presided over a dominating and flawless performance in the Sri Lanka Tests. Then, after an Asia Cup that started with a bang but ended with a whimper, Zaka twisted the knife yet further, getting his goons in the media to attack Babar while holding a public inquisition over Arthur, Bradburn and Babar right before the World Cup.

After the World Cup, Zaka finally got a chance to get rid of the dreaded foreign coaches, as well as cutting Babar and his so-called “dosti/yaari” squad down to size. The process was shambolic, the outcome idiotic: firing Bradburn, a former fielding coach turned head coach, had a palpable effect on our fielding standards. We went from taking everything, including several blinders, in Sri Lanka to dropping a dozen catches, most of them laughably easy, in Australia.

The mismanagement at the Pakistan Cricket Board is nowhere more shambolic than in how it handles our star players

Zaka then anointed Mohammad Hafeez, a man with lots of opinions but zero coaching credentials or experience. The ‘Outside Edge’ column has long believed Hafeez’s reputation as some sort of cricketing sage is quite undeserved.

To back up Hafeez, Zaka chose as selectors Wahab Riaz, who shortly went on to give one of the most unprofessional press conferences from a Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) official in living memory, and the likes of Kamran Akmal and Salman Butt, whose sterling reputations precede them. Butt was relieved of his duties less than 48 hours later, but if these are the waters Zaka is fishing in, what does it say about him and those advising him?

Up and down the PCB, good, hard-working people have left, fed up with the nonsense and the noise. In their place have arrived lackeys, nepo babies, and hangers-on of the most pathetic and nauseating kind. The recent audio leaks from Zaka’s conversations with his family about the inner workings of the team were equal parts unsurprising, depressing and infuriating, confirming what we all intuited: our cricket board is in the hands of a low-IQ, boomer WhatsApp uncle.

And the effects are not minor. Let’s start with our best player, whom Zaka has destroyed mentally. You can see it in the way Babar bats. Since the Asia Cup, he has looked nothing like the Babar of 2018-2022.

Batsmen are allowed to lose form, sure, but what’s happened to Babar isn’t a plain old run-of-the-mill dip in form. Rather, he has been diminished by the unnecessary pressure piled on him since Zaka and, by extension, Hafeez took over.

From staged media campaigns to revealing WhatsApp texts, from strategic leaks to public dressing downs, Babar’s head has been messed with beyond recognition. And not only did it affect his batting, this dirty campaign, in hindsight, extinguished whatever chances we had in the World Cup as well as in Australia, given the centrality of his runs to the team’s success.

Don’t get it twisted: Babar was not a great captain and Pakistan cricket is better off with him just focusing on batting. But the way his captaincy was taken from him, and the embarrassment he was put through for months on end, was unprofessional and disgraceful. Shame on the PCB and shame on those lifafa “journalists” who did Zaka’s dirty work (cough, Shoaib Jatt, cough).

Then there’s Shaheen, who has been destroyed physically. This is a development years in the making, across three chairmen and several coaches, though, curiously, just one captain (one of the biggest criticisms against Babar’s captaincy was his lack of rotation).

Since Shaheen’s debut, no quick bowler has come close to bowling the number of overs he has bowled across formats. After he got injured fielding on the boundary in Sri Lanka in 2022, the PCB completely botched his rehab and, then to exacerbate things, rushed him back from injury for the 2022 World Cup, where he got injured again — a decision whose reverberations are still felt today.

Australia ensure Cummins, Hazlewood and Starc only play major ICC tournaments and bilateral Test series, foregoing bilateral ODI and T20s series against non-Big 3 opposition. India wrap Bumrah in cotton wool. England designated Anderson and Broad as exclusively red ball bowlers for more than half a decade. Some of this comes down to finances, sure, but not all of it.

Did money force us to play Shaheen in meaningless bilaterals against Afghanistan in the heat and humidity of Sri Lanka in August? Fans who wonder why Shaheen’s pace has dropped more than 10 km/h since 2021 have simply not been paying attention to how his career has been handled.

The scariest thing about all this is that Shaheen and Babar are our crown jewels, the two most valuable assets to Pakistan cricket. If this is how they are handled, what hope for the thousands of other professional cricketers in this country?

To pick but one example, what do you suppose is going to happen to Khurram Shahzad, who was arguably our best bowler in Perth before he suffered a serious injury? How much money would you bet on him playing more than five Test matches in his career?

In general, relative to national boards, media, and fans, Pakistan treats its cricketers arguably the worst of any major cricketing country. Physically, we don’t look after them: just think about the list of fast bowlers whose injuries we’ve mishandled — Zahid, Shoaib, Junaid, Gul, Hasan Ali and (gulp) maybe Naseem and Ihsanullah now?

Financially, the Board manoeuvres against a players’ union. When players do win concessions in difficult negotiations, such as the recent agreement that centrally contracted players could play in two non-PSL leagues, they are ignored or dragged through the mud for acting on those very concessions (what this board and management did to Haris Rauf and his reputation is borderline criminal).

Mentally, for lack of a better phrase, we mess with players’ heads, especially when they are young and most in need of a sound support structure. The best recent example to this end would be poor old Mohammad Haris, who has the potential to be Pakistan’s biggest weapon in the T20 top order, but was inexplicably dropped from the only format he truly excels in.

The reasons for this were (a) nonsensical (insiders say his exclusion stems from doubts about his technique, a ridiculous concern in T20 cricket), and (b) falsely conveyed to the public (the chief selector, Wahab Riaz, claimed he was rested when, in fact, he was dropped).

God knows that the “elections” scheduled for next month are not going to deliver Pakistan much promise. But if nothing else, they will ensure the end of Zaka Ashraf. One hopes that whatever regime follows him — reading the tea leaves, Najam Sethi is poised for a return — puts players first, starting with our top stars, but extending to the entirety of the professional class in domestic cricket.

The writer is an associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in the US. X: @ahsanib

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 14th, 2024