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…

Administrator PAK vs NZ, Pakistan Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Dunedin, Ijaz Butt, Iqbal Qasim, Mohammad Yousuf, New Zealand, Pakistan, PCB, Quaid-i-Azam, Sri Lanka, UAE, Younis Khan, Younus Khan

Pakistan cricket is not alien to crisis. From time to time we have experienced it in every era and the present one is not any different to others.

The reason mainly being poor governance by those at the helm who had little or no ability at all to control the situation and, to save their own skin, they would succumb to all kind of pressures.

Sadly, a great majority of those administrators were forced upon the system to run the game as they pleased. The present lot is not any different.

Already a year in the office, they have neither managed to have a constitution nor have been able to convince their critics about the irregularities in maintaining accounts.

This is a huge scam and even the governing body of the PCB, which is supposed to bring some sort of transparency in the working of the board, has so far failed to make their presence felt.

The few voices of dissent from a couple of members from time to time in the meetings did little but not enough to go past the deaf ears of the PCB chairman who could have done the game some service had he not so far resorted to arbitrary decisions.

The appointment of Mohammad Yousuf as the captain for the tour of New Zealand has also come about in a similar fashion.

The members of the governing body once again have been made to look like the ‘dead ducks’. Their feathers have long been clipped from the time they joined the board and the future members will not be any different.

In a crisis like the one which resulted in Younis Khan quitting the captaincy and the tour, strong management should have made sure to shove off all the nonsense that has been going around within the team and should have made sure to back their captain to set an example Read more…

Administrator Pakistan Blogs.CMDN.com, Cricket, Cricket Blogs, Hafeez Kardar, Imran Khan, Karachi, Majid Khan, Miandad, Mohammad Yousuf, Mushtaq Mohammad, New Zealand, Pakistan, PCB, Wasim Bari, Younis Khan, Zaheer Abbas

As fate would have it, on the day Ireland announced they would formally apply to the ICC for full-member status, New Zealand gave them every reason to feel confident. They couldn’t do any worse, could they?

You can almost see the Irish delegation compiling a DVD nasty of New Zealand’s 138-run rout at the hands of Pakistan in the Abu Dhabi desert as evidence for inclusion.

It was Ireland, after all, who sent the Pakistanis packing from the 2007 World Cup.

New Zealand’s loss yesterday has little relevance in the grand scheme of things - just another one-day international in a crowded calendar - but it has rubbed out much of the goodwill accrued from their run to the final of the Champions Trophy in South Africa last month.

Fingers have predictably pointed in the direction of the coach, or lack thereof. New Zealand comfortably accounted for the same opposition one month ago with Andy Moles at the helm, although that argument conveniently ignores the fact that Vettori was effectively running the cutter at that point, Moles having lost the confidence of the dressing room.

In fact, the whole dressing room strife as a hurdle to success argument was kneecapped by Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan allrounder who put the shake into Sheikh Zayed Stadium.

This is the same Afridi who had recently dominated headlines in Pakistan because of his supposed rift with captain Younis Khan over (if you believe the desert telegraph) his desire to be one-day captain.

Yesterday he smote 70 from 50 deliveries, then came within an inch of a hat-trick when befuddling New Zealand’s lower middle order. All that controversy must have really played havoc with his “head space”.

No, the coaching debacle is too convenient a scapegoat. The real reason for the calamitous performance was that when the blowtorch was applied NZ’s batsmen again melted Read more…

Administrator PAK vs NZ Aaron Redmond, Abu Dhabi, Andy Moles, Brendon McCullum, Champions Trophy, ICC, Jesse Ryder, Mohammad Aamer, New Zealand, Pakistan, Saeed Ajmal, Shahid Afridi, Sheikh Zayed Stadium, South Africa, Twenty20, Umar Gul, Younis Khan

Pakistan’s cricket team has departed for the upcoming series against New Zealand with great expectations. The side balances class and experience with a healthy dose of youth and excitement. Separate squads have been selected for Tests, ODIs, and Twenty20 games.

One positive note that has not received much comment is the appointment of Abdul Raqib as the tour manager. He replaces Yawar Saeed, who had become the subject of criticism from players and fellow officials because of his high-handed management style. Yawar, who is close to PCB chief Ijaz Butt and belongs to an influential segment of Pakistan’s cricket establishment, received a generous run as manager. Credit to Mr Butt that he realised it was time for a change.

Raqib, an orthodox left-arm spinner from the 1980s, has been a stalwart for Habib Bank in domestic cricket and now heads the bank’s sports section. One of his first gestures was to invite Younis Khan and Shahid Afridi — the team’s two biggest guns — to his office and facilitate a thawing of relations that had become icy during the Jamshed Dasti-Younis Khan saga. Raqib’s opening move of peacemaker promises to be auspicious. From Pakistan’s team selection, of course, the most notable news is that Misbah-ul-Haq’s name is not in it. Misbah has been a capable batsman who pulled off some truly impressive performances, but this development probably signals the end of the road for his batting career. The reason for this can be summarised in two words — Umar Akmal. Misbah is not alone in this predicament. Not much fuss has been made of it, but in fact Shoaib Akhtar’s international career has also ended in similar fashion — in Shoaib’s case, from the emergence of Mohammad Aamer. Nothing keeps players on their toes like the threat of being replaced by fresher legs and younger blood. In time, the young blood will mature and eventually face a similar threat. It is the circle of life.

Eyebrows have been raised on Misbah’s omission, but an examination of his record validates the decision. Half of his 12 ODI innings this year have seen him dismissed in single figures; and his eight Test innings in 2009, which include two 50s but also a string of single-digit scores, left expectations unfulfilled. In Twenty20 cricket, in which Misbah had fashioned a reputation for himself as something of a specialist, he kept getting out cheaply in crucial matches, managing only low scores against the frontline teams in the Twenty20 World Championship earlier Read more…

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The cricket world has closed ranks behind Pakistan after the campaign of whispers which followed their loss to Australia

If he had been alive today, Charles Dickens would have been the ideal candidate to write the history of Pakistan cricket. Even when it enjoys the best of times, the worst ones are not far away, and the age of wisdom and the epoch of belief are frequently obscured by the age of foolishness and the epoch of incredulity.

For a team who are cricket’s itinerants, unlikely to play any matches at home until at least 2011, this has been a special year, with victory in the World Twenty20 followed by progression to the last four of the Champions Trophy. Given that Pakistan had made only one major semi-final this decade – the Champions Trophy in 2004 – you’d have thought that folk back home would be proud of Younis Khan and his men.

Not all folk. Jamshed Ahmed Dasti, the chairman of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Sports, alleged that the matches against Australia [a last-ball defeat] and New Zealand were fixed. Once he lit the match, India’s many television channels gleefully poured more oil and fanned the flames.

On Tuesday morning, just a few hours after Australia had clinched the trophy, Osman Samiuddin, Cricinfo’s Pakistan editor, was repeatedly woken up by calls from various reporters asking for a “reaction to the sacking of Younis Khan and Intikhab Alam [the coach]“. We had shared an apartment during the fortnight, and in my early-morning stupor, I could hear Osman asking what their sources were. Frantic calls were made to journalists in Pakistan, and others in South Africa. No one had a clue. By then, the Times of India and others that should know better had already run the “sack” story. No credible source, no confirmation. But why let that come in Read more…

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Congratulations, Pakistan! Younis Khan's men deserved to win as much as MS Dhoni's boys deserved to lose in the Champion's Trophy game on Saturday. Pakistan weren't just the better team on paper; they were superior on the pitch too. They outdid India in every aspect of the game, including delivering no-balls.
 
We lost because we played mediocre cricket. And that's because without Zaheer, Sehwag and Yuvraj, we ARE a mediocre team. None of our bowlers is good enough to play for Pakistan. Most of their bowlers can walk into our side. The real problem is that we seem to be satisfied with mediocrity. It requires very little for players like Ishant Sharma or RP Singh to find a place in the playing XI.
 
Sharma seems more interested in restricting runs than taking wickets. Just recall how frequently he gets wickets in his first spell. It has been long since he effectively moved the ball. And he seems to lack the fire to bowl fast. His figures 8-2-39-2 will never reflect how ineffective he was.
 
It is the same story with RP Singh. Without pace and movement, he looks like a lamb to the slaughter. Relatively speaking, Praveen Kumar offers a better package: he is a better batsman, a better fielder and certainly has more craft and variation. But, for some reason, Singh seems to be regularly preferred.
 
And one shouldn't dismiss Harbhajan's 1 for 71 (the wicket came of his last ball) as 'one of those bad days'. Like Sharma, he too prefers to restrict a batsman than attack him. I am aware that he has over 200 ODI wickets and that he grabbed 5 wickets in the Colombo final earlier this month. But how consistently does he make effective bowling contributions? Just look at his bowling record in the last 10 games. Apart from the final, he has seven wickets in the other 9 games. One slow bowler who has really impressed in recent times - with his art as well as Read more...

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What is the deal with the Champions Trophy?

The tournament is long a punch-drunk target for criticism across the spectrum and around the world; like airline food and Viagra the tournament’s flaws and banalities have been exhaustively and repeatedly documented in recent years: 2002-3, which never ended; 2004, which seemed as if it never would; 2006-7, which might not have bothered to finish for all that anyone cared.

One week from now, we go again. Strap yourself in.

At stake is US$4million tournament in prize money and a “special Champions Trophy jacket” for each member of the winning team. That is ’special’ like special schools are special.

No doubt there are four million reasons for the world’s best players to head to the Johannesburg and Centurion in the coming days. But it is not enough to suggest that money is the only reason - if nothing else, $4million doesn’t go too far these days.

And as fetching as the jackets are, apparently aspiring to a classical Bogartian suavity, they probably don’t constitute a full explanation either.

Perhaps it’s the fans. Haroon Lorgat has promised a “fantastic spectacle”, and who would doubt it? This is, we are so often told, an entertainment business so perhaps it is respect for their audience that keeps our overworked stars at the office.

Most likely, though, seems the bauble itself. The Champions Trophy holds a singular, peculiar status: an utter waste of time to everybody else, but those who win it acclaim a Read more…

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For once Daniel Vettori’s worth to his team will not entirely be measured by his performance with bat, ball or as a cricket tactician.

What New Zealand needs most from their captain at R Premadasa Stadium tomorrow (2100 NZT) is Vettori to win the toss and choose to bat first against Sri Lanka in the opening match of their one-day international Tri-Series with India.

Statistics are ripe for manipulation but when Premadasa is involved the figures don’t lie: lose the toss, lose the game.

In the last 10 ODI matches at Sri Lanka’s premier day-night cricket venue, the team who bat with the sun on their backs, win with varying degrees of simplicity.

Once the sun sets, the ball can be unplayable as it swings and seams prodigiously - Pakistan’s two matches against Sri Lanka there last month a case in point.

Already 0-3 down in the five-match series, Pakistan’s Younis Khan ensured his side regained some respectability by dictating terms in the capital.

In the fourth match Pakistan amassed 321 for five; Sri Lanka a measly 175 in reply. Sri Lanka’s pace spearheads Lasith Malinga and Thilan Thushara both conceded 74 runs from their 10 overs; Pakistani medium pacer Iftikhar Anjum nabbed a career best five for 30 a couple of hours later.

Then, in the final dead rubber, Pakistan’s 279 was more than enough - Sri Lanka folded Read more…

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Sports may specialize in tales of the improbable, but there are still some things you just don’t expect to see happen. On Wednesday, Shahid Afridi will captain Pakistan’s cricketers in a Twenty20 international against Sri Lanka in Colombo.

Think Michael Vick becoming president of the Humane Society of the United States, or Manchester United’s manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, being awarded the Freedom of Liverpool.

Of course not all national cricket captains are straight arrows like England’s Andrew Strauss. Should Afridi last very long in his new role, there is a good chance he will find himself tossing for innings with Ricky Ponting of Australia, whose issues with alcohol and betting once threatened to capsize his career.

Afridi, 29, has had a career whose colorfulness is eclipsed among current players only by his turbulent erstwhile Pakistan teammate Shoaib Akhtar. Afridi’s extensive rap sheet includes a four-match ban for insulting opponents and a match umpire; a dressing room dispute with his captain and vice captain over his place in Pakistan’s batting order; sanctions after a girl was found in his room — his explanation that she was seeking his autograph was not accepted — and being fingered as the provocateur two years ago when Akhtar finally lost it and struck Read more…

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Captain Kumar Sangakkara felt Sri Lanka could have won the second Test in Colombo against Pakistan if wicketkeeper Tillakaratne Dilshan had been fit.

The hosts began the final day still needing 309 to overhaul Pakistan’s target of 492 and had seven wickets in hand.

Sangakkara, resuming on 50 at the start of the day, added another 80 runs to his personal tally to remain unbeaten as the match ended in a draw.

He put on 122 for the fourth wicket with Thilan Samaraweera (73) and an unbroken 114 for the fifth wicket with Angelo Mathews (64 not out).

Sri Lanka had needed 123 from the last 20 overs and had reduced the target to 101 from a possible 16 when the two captains agreed a draw.

“If Dilshan was fully fit, and if we had managed to score a few more runs after the tea interval, I think we would have gone for it,” Sangakkara said.

“We thought about it, but losing a Test match was not something we wanted.

“I think the right decision was made in the end.”

Dilshan fractured a finger while keeping wicket and had watched most of the proceedings Read more…

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