MUCH is being written these days about where to start from in terms of rebuilding the national side from the ashes of the recent disaster in the home series against India. As far as I am concerned, I am fed up with this business of ‘rebuilding’ the side.
Come to think of it, all steps are taken in the name of building and rebuilding the team. For more than a couple of years we were told that the team was being built for the World Cup. When the team delivered its worst performance in the history of the competition in South Africa, after all the ‘building’ efforts, we were told that it was time to rebuild the team.
The nation then witnessed a lot of policy U-turns and highly debatable decisions as well as selection fiascoes, all in the name of rebuilding the side. After a year of that confusion, the team fell flat on its face against the Indians, giving us another reason to rebuild yet again!
I think it is in the interest of Pakistan Cricket that this odious term was dropped from the official PCB jargon, which is nothing but a rug under which is pushed much of the dirt by most officials. It is a pretext used by them to take whimsical decisions. It is a curtain behind which they take refuge. If rebuilding is really so important, those concerned would be much better off rebuilding the PCB, for it sure is in the need of some professionalism.
As I see it, we have to see the future of Pakistan Cricket in the long run. A change here and a chop there is not going to be of much help. The short term will continue to be a roller-coaster ride for the team that it has been for some years, making the nation proud one day and falling in a heap the very next day. But if a long-term view is not taken seriously, sincerely and professionally, my fear is that the latter category — falling in a heap — will begin to show its ugly much more frequently.
In the previous column, I had sighted the example of what has taken place in the game of hockey in the country, and the lessons it offers to the managers of the game of cricket. Another relevant example that comes to mind is that of the West Indians, who are now permanently placed in a deep hole and don’t know how to get out of it.
From being a cricketing powerhouse and the sole superpower for almost two decades, they are now a side that no one fancies. And the whole transformation took not more than a few years. My fear is that we may have already taken our first steps on that unfortunate road. While it may be unfortunate, the fact remains that we, like the West Indies did in their case, have been contributing to our downfall. And this decreases the ‘unfortunate’ part of the equation and brings in the element of system failure for which we cannot blame anyone but ourselves.
Another thing to remember is that we have never been the sustained world-beaters in the sense that the West Indians were, and, so, our downfall will be much quicker and deeper. We have never ruled the world like the West Indians did, or like the Australians are doing. This has been so because we have failed to mature from a thrilling team to a winning outfit, for that needs performance consistency.
Even our World Cup triumph back in 1992 was more about turning things around sharply than about being consistent through the tournament. Of course that takes nothing away from the victory itself, but the point is that heroics can make you look like a world-beater in the short term, but you cannot be the ruling elite without being consistent. How we can possibly work on being consistent is something that we would be talking about in the days ahead. But it will not be about rebuilding. Rest assured.
MUCH is being written these days about where to start from in terms of rebuilding the national side from the ashes of the recent disaster in the home series against India. As far as I am concerned, I am fed up with this business of ‘rebuilding’ the side.
