LAHORE: Pakistan Cricket Board’s surprise decision to include all-rounder Sohail Tanvir in the ODI squad for the ongoing series against Australia as replacement of injured pacer Junaid Khan completely defies logic and ridicules the whole process of selecting the centrally contracted players for national representation.

It was barely a few months ago that the PCB had awarded central contracts to 31 leading players of the country on the basis of their previous year’s performance and Sohail Tanvir failed to find a place in all the four categories namely A, B, C and D.

In recalling Sohail, however, the selectors have totally disregarded the merit, ignoring talented and experienced pacers like Umar Gul, Mohammad Talha, Rahat Ali, Bilawal Bhatti and Ehsan Adil who feature in the various categories of the central contracts, making the list on the dint of their performance during the 2013-14 season.

Umar Gul who has been placed in the ‘B’ category of central contracts or Talha who features in the ‘D’ category would certainly have been better choices as Junaid’s replacement instead of Sohail.

It may be mentioned here that for the current ODI series, the selectors and the PCB had earlier ignored seasoned batsman Younis Khan despite giving him ‘A’ category in the central contracts.

It is lamentable that while the Pakistan team is experiencing defeat after defeat in international cricket, neither the PCB nor the selectors are ready to undertake serious measures to prepare the squad for the 2015 World Cup, now just a few months away. In fact, the team management is still busy doing experiments and obliging their blue-eyed players.

In the first ODI against the Aussies, team management tested wicket-keeper batsman Sarfraz Ahmed as opener which was in contrast to the plan laid out by chief selector Moin Khan at the time of announcing the team for the ongoing series.

Answering a question during the press conference last month, he had said that if any of the regular openers Hafeez or Ahmed Shehzad get injured, then either Umar Amin or Asad Shafiq would be tried as opener.

Ironically, Hafeez has injured his hand in a practice match and ruled out of the ODI series but Asad is still there in the squad and is being adjusted in the middle-order as before.

Pakistan has lost the lone T20 clash as well as the first ODI to Australia by heavy margin and there is an urgent need to make serious and sincere efforts to regroup and raise the players’ confidence by taking the right decisions.

The national team has clearly been low on morale since the successive Test and ODI defeats in Sri Lanka recently but unfortunately the elaborate 10-man team management has not been able to turn things around for Pakistan despite getting a good one-month break to prepare the team for the challenging Australia series.

Published in Dawn, October 10th, 2014