Pakistan finally won a Test after a yawning gap of nearly three years and 12 Test matches. On the face of it, the Wellington win appeared a convincing one because the Kiwis were crushed by 141 runs.

However, with our shoddy performance at Dunedin earlier, where Mohammad Yousuf and his brigade lost a battle they could have won with little more application and skill, predicting the outcome of the Test series would be foolhardy.

And while the grim battle goes on between bat and ball in the Test series, the off-field saga of Aussie tour captaincy is getting more complexed by the day.

As if Younis Khan’s ‘request for rest’ from international cricket was startling enough, we are now experiencing an agonising wait on who would be leading the Pakistan squad to a country where we have never won a Test series.

One wonders whether Younis’ astonishing absence and the subsequent reaction to it by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) can be rated as acts of professionalism by any standard.

A recent media report suggested that makeshift skipper Yousuf, assuming himself to be the captain-designate for Australia, has already proposed changes in the team for the challenging assignment following the mysterious silence of Younis who also missed the recent Quaid-i-Azam Trophy games despite chief selector Iqbal Qasim’s insistence on featuring in the same.

Needless to say, if the hastily-made leadership arrangement for the New Zealand Tests is persevered with, the move will certainly have its ramifications given the complexity of the present national cricket set-up.

Due to this captaincy crisis, Pakistan cricket seems to be in a shambles. Sometimes Read more…

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ALL is not well at the Pakistan Cricket Board. The PCB’s workings have never been a byword for stability but the flux seen these days is remarkable even by the board’s standards.

Within a space of three months, two senior members of the PCB set-up have resigned while another has been sacked. Outspoken chief selector Abdul Qadir was the first to quit, citing ‘unacceptable’ interference in selection matters. The second resignation came from National Cricket Academy director and former captain Aamer Sohail. It is believed the PCB chairman’s apparent failure to give him a free hand in running the academy and starting new development programmes convinced Mr Sohail that it was time to go.

Meanwhile, reports of chief operating officer Saleem Altaf’s increasingly tense relationship with chairman Ijaz Butt had been doing the rounds for quite some time. He was dismissed a week ago.

Ijaz Butt, who has also been in slanging matches with the Senate’s standing committee on sports, is the central figure in this sorry saga. His attitude towards the media has occasionally bordered on hostility and he is not averse either to making inconsistent statements.

It doesn’t end there. In the aftermath of the attack on the Sri Lankan team, Mr Butt lashed out at match referee Chris Broad who had claimed that security for players and officials was lax in Lahore. Resorting to language unbecoming, he called Broad a liar even though the massive security lapse was apparent to all and was subsequently accepted by Pakistani officials.

Mr Butt may have also botched Pakistan’s chances of holding its World Cup matches at neutral venues. He allegedly became stroppy with the ICC and alienated the other co-hosts by demanding that the whole tournament be moved out of the subcontinent. Pakistan Read more…

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