• Babar Azam’s resignation latest symptom of rot that permeates sport’s affairs
• Board not getting the message, despite embarrassing losses to US, Bangladesh
• Insiders say ‘revolving door’ at PCB means players, coaches only care for own jobs

FOR the second time in 11 months, Babar Azam has resigned as Pakistan’s captain. The merry-go-round of captaincy should end with him stepping down from the One-day International and T20I positions, if sanity prevails.

However, experience has shown that this is seldom the case in Pakistan cricket.

Since taking charge as T20 skipper in October 2019, before he was handed the reins of the Test and One-Day International teams, Babar’s stint as skipper — which lasted a total of four years, four weeks and a day, before his first resignation back in November last year — was probably the only stable thing in Pakistan cricket.

Despite his reinstatement as the limited-overs captain in March this year, fractures in the team were evident. A few months later, Pakistan suffered perhaps their most shocking defeat in international cricket at the hands of virtual newcomers.

On a sweaty June afternoon, the United States of America had registered their maiden victory over the T20 World Cup favourites. It was, undoubtedly, Pakistan cricket’s worst-ever moment.

The defeat was swiftly followed by reports of rifts between players, who were said to have formed separate groups within the dressing room.

A team that, despite all its frailties and the subsequent criticism levelled against it, had at least united under Babar Azam, seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

This was not an isolated incident, being preceded and followed by other humbling defeats, which eventually prompted the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) to hold a ‘Connection Camp’ last month, aimed at fostering team unity. Babar’s resignation came days after that camp, with the star batter saying he now wanted to focus on contributing to the team as a player.

The shock in Dallas had come seven months after another “worst-ever”; with Afghanistan similarly making history against Pakistan in Chennai during the ODI World Cup. That defeat came amid reports that then-PCB chief Zaka Ashraf had been ignoring Babar’s phone calls and messages in an apparent attempt to break the skipper’s power hold.

“What the players do is a reflection of what happens in the PCB,” a member of the Pakistan dressing room during the World Cup in India told Dawn when asked what makes lobbying among players such a recurring phenomenon.

“For such things to not happen, the PCB needs to be a more stable organisation. It has to have a vision. a long-term plan in order to create a sense of security among players.”

PCB’s incumbent chief Mohsin Naqvi has attempted to restore some semblance of order since taking over earlier this year, becoming the first elected chairman after 13 months of interim regimes. But even his tenure has been marred by the stunning recent Test whitewash, at home no less, by Bangladesh.

One of country’s leading coaches says ‘there’s no vision, no real pathway forward; everyone is scared, most people try to save their own jobs’

Dawn sent a detailed questionnaire to PCB chief Mohsin Naqvi, as well as the board’s media managers, asking for responses to the contentions raised in this article. After initially agreeing to comment, no response to the queries was received for several days, until the filing of this report.

While the loss to Bangladesh was a shocker for many and lifted the veil from Pakistan’s woes, for more pragmatic onlookers, it was a simple case of “as you sow, so shall you reap”.

In fact, Pakistan cricket has perfected its recipe for disaster: a spoonful of instability, a dash of insecurity, cooked on the flames of incompetence.

Revolving door

Bureaucrats, politicians, retired army officers, diplomats, and even journalists have sat in the PCB chairman’s seat at some point. The post is known to be a reward for those who please the powers that be in one way or another.

But while the PCB’s past constitutions have allowed its chairmen a tenure of three years, the board has been run by four men in the short span of two years since 2022.

After Ramiz Raja took over from Ehsan Mani following the end of the latter’s tenure in September 2022, he was replaced by Najam Sethi — a former PCB chairman himself — a little more than a year later.

Sethi then lost the position seven months later, with another former chairman, Zaka Ashraf, taking the seat in July.

Both Sethi and Zaka led the interim Management Committee of the board, whose elections had been due since Ramiz’s ouster.

But while it seems quite easy, on paper at least, for the leadership of the board to change hands, it usually happens at the behest of the country’s prime minister. As the patron-in-chief of the PCB’s Board of Governors (BoG), the premier is also entitled to replace the board’s chief at any given point in time.

Before Mohsin Naqvi’s eventual election in February this year — after he was nominated to the BoG by caretaker prime minister Anwaar ul Haq Kakar — then-PCB election commissioner Shah Khawer had hoped the practice of the patron virtually choosing the chairman would stop.

“My thoughts are still the same,” he told Dawn. “Two changes of governments have seen as many changes of constitutions as well. There should be consistency and the board should look to dissolve the powers of the prime minister.”

Vicious cycle

According to a former PCB senior official, the foundations of cricket’s administrative structure were laid in a way that the sport has found itself trapped in a “vicious cycle”.

The need for departmental support to employ players, based on financial constraints dating back to the country’s founding, may have alllowed the game to flourish, but it stymied the evolution of a grassroots structure, the soul of which is club cricket.

If a prime minister stays for a full five year term, that would allow the long-term plans of a PCB chairman to be implemented to some extent, the insider said. But unfortunately, that’s not how things work in Pakistan.

As a consequence, he argued, the patrons appoint “cronies for political reasons”, conceding that he, too, was one of them.

“The idea of leadership for these chairmen is all about selecting the players and the captains, and they have no knowledge about grassroots cricket and the development of the sport.”

New administrators at the regional level did not know how to run club cricket, which is why it remained ‘almost dead’ between 2019 and 2022

But even in the absence of an organised club structure, departmental cricket was still holding things together. Cricketers had jobs and the ones who did not toiled hard in regional teams to get noticed by these departments.

This continued until the PCB, led by Ehsan Mani — who was appointed as the chairman by then-prime minister Imran Khan — introduced the 2019 constitution of the board, which ended the role of departments and regions and replaced them with a top-tier consisting of six provincial association teams.

Departmental blow

This was a blow, not only for the already-struggling club and regional cricket structure, but also for a big number of players, who now were laid off by their respective departments. Many bid adieu to the sport; others were forced to leave the country for opportunities abroad. This eventually shrank the pool of players available for the national team.

“Abolishing the departments’ role, I’d say, was the last nail in Pakistan cricket’s coffin,” former Test player Yasir Arafat told Dawn.

Yasir, who is also a qualified coach, believed departmental cricket was keeping the sport’s ecosystem alive in Pakistan.

“As a product of departmental cricket myself — I have represented Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) for a good 15 years — I know how beneficial it has been for the players and their families,” noted Yasir.

“All players had to do was to concentrate on their fitness and performance and even after their retirements, their respective departments continued to be their financial support.”

He pointed out how departments were acting as de facto sponsors of the sport in the country.

A number of departments had their own training facilities; including the likes of KRL, UBL, State Bank of Pakistan, National Bank of Pakistan and Pakistan Customs, who were working as academies and nurseries for the players and were automatic sponsors of the sport — something that the PCB struggled to rope in afterwards.

“Rather than improving the cricket infrastructure, it was shrunk down to a six-team structure in a country where the sport is so popular.”

The six-team structure did bring quality, but the squads of those sides did not have any balance and the pathway for new talent — clubs, districts and regions — became obscured, according to former club cricketer and analyst Ahmer Najeeb Satti.

“Since the new administrators at the regional level did not have much idea of how to run club cricket, it stayed almost dead between 2019 and 2022,” he told Dawn.

“To add to that, there was so much competition for places at the top that players knocking on the doors at the lower tiers had no chance whatsoever to prove their mettle.”

Growing insecurity

The tenures of various chairmen since 2022 saw the PCB employ four sets of national team selectors, and as many sets of coaching staff, decimating the consistency required to build a sporting team.

The high frequency of changes in the cricketing ecosystem gave birth to insecurity among the players, coaches and other stakeholders.

“Since there is no vision, no real pathway forward, most people try to save their own jobs; be it players, coaches or anyone else,” one of the top coaches in the country, who has been involved with the national team, told Dawn.

In such an environment, he says: “Every player and coach is scared, because we aren’t giving time for them to carry out a proper development process.”

Moreover, the culture of insecurity has also kept Pakistan from adopting the newer approaches that have come along with the incorporation of science and technology in cricket.

“The world has progressed forward and we need to catch up,” said Yasir. “Our players’ skill level and mindset is way below what is required at the international level. You can’t survive on skill [alone] in international cricket today, there is biomechanics, mental health, nutrition and many more aspects to the game now.”

Echoing Yasir’s views, Abdul Rehman — another seasoned coach, believed players should be allowed to nurture their “natural flair” at the domestic and the grassroots level, rather than being discouraged from standing out.

“There should be some understanding and a proper methodology towards player development,” he said. “Players should be identified through visionary selection. Everyone can identify the extraordinarily talented players, but it’s important to identify players who have the potential to turn extraordinary.”

Another revamp

The PCB introduced yet another revamped domestic structure in August.

The new system, which includes both regions and departments, has a five-team top-tier named the “Champions Cup”.

Along with that, the PCB has also promised thousands of matches as part of “pathway” tournaments.

But the execution of this larger-than-life plan already seems to have been compromised.

The Champions Cup One-Day tournament started on Sept. 12 after an 11-day postponement with the board naming the five sides’ squads days ahead of the competition. Even the name of one of the teams was changed just on the eve of the tournament.

The PCB has already started tweaking the schedule of the domestic cricket programme, and also went on to abruptly announce the postponement of the National Inter-Region U-19 three-day cricket tournament after the first day’s play of the event.

Former Test pacer-turned-coach Shabbir Ahmed — who was assigned to select the Dera Ghazi Khan district team for the ongoing senior inter district competition — recently alleged interference by the PCB, further raising questions over the workings of grassroots cricket.

While talking to Dawn, Shabbir claimed he “received a call from a PCB official” to include a player in the team who “wasn’t deserving due to his absence for most of the pre-selection training camp”.

“I was asked to pick him over another deserving player, to which I said no and decided to resign as the coach of the team,” he alleged.

“The input of the coaches is being ignored while selection decisions are being made purely on the quantity of runs scored or wickets taken by them in tournaments, which are not even being organised properly.”

Management challenges

Critical analysts have attributed the mismanagement to the influx of inexperienced personnel into the PCB, allegedly without taking merit into consideration.

After Mohsin Naqvi took the PCB position, a number of officers were hired by the board who used to work with him during his days as caretaker chief minister of Punjab.

Moreover, under the new chief, the patron has been given the power to nominate three names for the BoG, a move not reflected in the 2014 constitution.

“The chairman has only one vote among the BoG members,” says Khawer, who constituted the BoG before changes were made in it. “The BoG has a significant role; it should be setting the policies of the PCB.”

According to another former PCB administrator, the board used to be entirely dependent on the revenue shared by the International Cricket Council (ICC) in the past, while departments took care of the players’ financial requirements.

“But with the popularity of white-ball cricket and the inception of franchise T20 leagues — both way more lucrative than the ICC share — the whole nature of the sport’s finances is changing,” he said.

“Things are complicated, contracts are complex and require administrators with high levels of competence,” he added.

With multidimensional challenges posed to cricket in Pakistan, stability remains the key for a return to its glory days.

Infographics by Dawn Creative

Published in Dawn, October 3rd, 2024