Captains fall and coaches sacked – this is the history of Pakistan: nothing changes

As Pakistan cricket lurches from one disaster to the next, it is worth noting that this is nothing new. It is, in fact, the template by which Pakistan has always existed, writes Osman Samiuddin.

Pakistan's captain Shahid Afridi celebrates after the dismissal of Bangladesh's batsman Sabbir Rahman during the World T20 cricket tournament match between Pakistan and Bangladesh at The Eden Gardens Show more

In 1961, several months after Pakistan’s tour to India had ended, the tour report of the manager Jahangir Khan was leaked to the Indian press. It was not a great tour from any angle.

All five Tests were drawn, all 10 side matches too. The run-rates were desultory, all intent hidden behind an overbearing fear of losing. Pakistan were lucky not to lose a Test at Delhi; they were unlucky not to win in Kolkata; most of us, let us agree, were lucky not to have endured watching it.

The report, though, was sensational for its time. In it Pakistan’s star player, Hanif Mohammed, and captain, Fazal Mahmood, came in for heaviest criticism, and the team said to be riven by factions and jealousy.

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Hanif emerged from it as the prima donna nobody is happy with, late for everything and an aloof presence. Fazal’s captaincy is damned and potshots taken at his lack of interest in his side once the day’s business was complete and the evening’s socialising in sight. Both players were fined and Fazal sacked as captain.

Just over a year later, Pakistan went to England and this was a properly disastrous tour. They lost four out of five Tests and should have lost all five. The new captain, the young Javed Burki, was a contentious, reluctant pick.

Very swiftly he would become the old captain, unable to pull together a transitional group of players who had either stayed on too long or those for whom this was too soon. The press in Pakistan complained that the players were pampered and selfish, interested more in personal aggrandisement than serving the country. One pressman, dramatically, called for cricket to be officially banned in Pakistan.

On their return, the country’s leader, Ayub Khan, also the patron of the board, set up an inquiry committee to look into this cricketing disaster. The results of that inquiry have never come out but Burki was a major casualty, sacked as captain.

A vast number of the squad never played again for Pakistan. The leadership of the board changed as well and duly, the first dark age of Pakistan cricket began.

This is to be taken as a brief situationer to the poisonous catharsis Pakistan cricket is undergoing right now.

Catharsis perhaps over-intellectualises this process. This is projectile vomit, an extreme reaction that purges the inside of all the bile that has been building up for a couple of years.

The conceit of each period in which this has happened is to imagine that it is the first and only such period, that it cannot possibly have ever been this bad, or this dire. But this is the eternal, hellish cycle of Pakistan cricket: to arrive to such a state where the only appropriate response is to take apart everything that constitutes that state piece by piece.

So we are here, in the aftermath of two leaked reports, one from Waqar Younis as coach, one from Intikhab Alam as manager, and a subsequent board inquiry. The coach has left, a captain has been dismissed, and the selection committee is kaput. Board heads are wobbling. The government wants to wade in. The mudslinging is in full swing.

It might have been eminently possible, and time-saving, had any of those earlier reports been reproduced and the names and dates simply changed. The template, then as now, does not change. Pick out some easy, individual targets (Umar Akmal, Ahmed Shehzad, Shahid Afridi), pay superficial nod to structural issues, offer simple, glib solutions which, without detail, are meaningless and then be gone.

A day before Pakistan’s World Twenty20 group game against Australia in Chandigarh, I met Waqar.

There was no specific agenda or purpose to the meeting, other than that he seemed to want merely to unload. He was a man besieged, by results, by players, by the system he was working in.

Much of what he spoke about forms the basis of his report. Two lines not in the report are worth mentioning. One was Waqar’s feeling that the cricket’s board support over the past two years extended to not having sacked him already.

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The other was a searing takedown of the state of the National Cricket Academy, which is supposed to be a polishing centre for Pakistani talent. Waqar said it was currently like a Gymkhana: an old, leisurely social club where exercise was the excuse whereby people socialised.

There was not as much introspection, understandable then because he was still in the role and now because it is not a trait common among public figures.

Waqar was hampered by a chief selector who, even in Pakistan’s vast canon of smilingly inept selectors, will stand out. And in Afridi, not only did he have a personality he could barely work with (or speak to) he also had a captain of erratic decision-making.

But Waqar’s own failings as coach have contributed if not to Pakistan’s gradual, decade-long limited overs decline, then to their more alarmingly steep recent fall.

Recommending Azhar Ali as captain; ignoring Sarfraz Ahmed as a candidate and as opener at the 2015 World Cup; not thinking a specialist spinner might be worth playing against one of India or Australia at the World Twenty20; these were not only errors of judgment, but betrayed a wider backwardness as coach.

In any case, these are mere details. The bigger story has not changed.

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