27 June 2004	Sunday	08 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

PAKISTAN Cricket Board (PCB) chairman Shaharyar M. Khan and his chief executive Ramiz Raja must be feeling elated after having secured the services of Englishman Bob Woolmer as national coach till the 2007 World Cup. Some of the euphoria almost seems as if roping in Woolmer has been nothing less than scaling Mount Everest or landing on the moon.

Such outbreaks of joy have become a national trait. New appointees are always hailed as saviours and regarded as God's gift. Upon failure, they are dumped like a hot potato. Miandad and Richard Pybus are two recent cases.

Interestingly, Pakistan cricket has the unenviable distinction of employing 11 coaches in the last five years, and no coach has completed his tenure. Besides, during the last 11 years Pakistan cricket has had the distinction of having 12 captains. This is not the first time that the PCB has chosen to engage foreign experts. Previous experiments failed.

Under the advice of the CEO, the PCB at one time had nearly a dozen foreign experts on its payroll, on whom substantial amounts of foreign exchange were spent. The experiment has proved to be a disaster from the outset. From being the second best team in the world in 1999, Pakistan today is at number six among the ten Test playing nations.

Like Woolmer, Pybus was also projected by PCB officials as a "miracle man" to bolster Pakistan's quest to challenge Australia's dominance. But under Pybus and other foreign experts, the Pakistan team has hit rock bottom and has yet to recover from the 2003 World Cup debacle.

The PCB chief, the chief executive and advisory council with no or little expertise of cricket - except for Hanif Mohammad - are certain that Woolmer is the messiah they have been looking for to turn the individually highly talented but unpredictable Pakistan team into the world's best.

They hope Woolmer, with his "laptop expertise" and use of modern technology, will produce results that Miandad and others could not.

No one can argue that technology plays an important role in today's age, but unfortunately it has not been the case in sports. If use of laptop and technology by coaches were recipes for success then without a shadow of doubt the United States would have become world champions in every major sport.

The reality is that in sports, team events specially are won by players and players only, backed by a professional management, something the present PCB set-up lacks.

Coaches might be able to improve performance marginally but they never have been able to turn "donkeys into thoroughbred race horses," as the saying goes.

Brazil are prime example, winning an unprecedented five football World Cup titles not through the use of modern "gadgetry" or by imported coaches, but entirely due to the brilliance of players like Pele, Garrincha and Ronaldo with the help of their own coaches.

Again if coaches alone were to bring success then petro-dollar rich Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE would have captured soccer's biggest prizes as they lured the world's best coaches by offering them astronomical sums but without any significant improvement in their skills.

Pakistan won the cricket World Cup in 1992 without a coach. The team lifted the game's biggest prize purely by performing better than their rivals through outstanding individual performances by Imran Khan, Miandad and Wasim Akram.

The PCB top brass, in an attempt to justify hiring Woolmer, is claiming that the Englishman had achieved outstanding results during his tenure as South Africa coach.

Let's not be hoodwinked because the facts are somewhat different. Woolmer achieved very little for South Africa. When he was appointed coach in 1994, South Africa were among the top three teams in the world. South Africa got the tag of "chokers" during Woolmer's tenure as the republic never won anything of importance.

During Woolmer's five-year coaching tenure, South Africa failed to win the World Cup in 1996 and 1999. Besides, the Proteas also not even came close to winning a Test series against Australia, currently the undisputed world champions in both Tests and ODIs.

In fact, while Woolmer was in charge of the South African team, the decline of the Proteas had set in. Being a shrewd individual, Woolmer knew his fate, and before he could be shown the door, the likable Englishman quit.

PCB officials should ask why if Woolmer was that outstanding, England did not hire his services to change their fortunes in the 1990s when the pioneers of the sport were the whipping boys of cricket.

The next few months will surely confirm as to what extent Pakistan has gained by engaging Woolmer and his hand-picked men for three years at a cost of millions of dollars. Another interesting thing to watch would be whether the new coach and his associates last the distance.