Over the past few years, Pakistan cricket has provided the business world with a case study rich with cornucopia of instances on how to run an organisation into disarray and failure despite having the world’s top-notch talent at its disposal. It hasn’t learnt from the way squash and hockey has gone awry in Pakistan. Talent management, it seems, is not our sports authorities’ forte. In fact our hockey and squash authorities would make every other country’s sports authorities look brilliant at it — even if they weren’t trying. A scientific study of PCB’s management would probably affirm what is known in the business world as the Peter Principle beyond doubt.

In 1969, Laurence J. Peter argued in his book, The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong that in every organisation people rise to their maximum level of incompetence. While the book was written in a humorous vein, it is indeed a serious management book and PCB’s resemblance to it is no laughing matter. In fact, it gets even more serious when it comes to a country like ours whose entire population relies on their cricket team to deliver what they otherwise can only long for in any other discipline — competing and winning internationally at the highest level.

Over the past few years, Pakistan cricket team has tried many different combinations of openers. Judging by results, this strategy has not worked. By the time an opening combination starts working, it is changed. In any professionally managed organisation, an attempt to try even a few different combinations of two individuals for any assignment, however tough, would be construed as a failure of the management rather than a failure of any combination per se. It is quite safe to assert that trying several combinations of individuals for any task would not be considered a good strategy. Indeed, it signifies a lack of one.

Pakistan cricket’s Achilles’ heel is not its ability to produce good openers, reliable middle-order batsmen or good fielders. The real Achilles’ heel is the inability to build a cricket structure in which only competent managers could survive.

To be fair, recent successes demonstrate that PCB has some really talented people. However, there is extraordinary cricket talent that PCB is unable to manage. Success can only be judged fairly by the talent available in achieving it. Indeed, it has constantly underutilised talent. World-class talent needs professional handling. In a country like Pakistan that unfortunately hardly produces any world-class talent outside of cricket, it should be treated like an urn of water in a desert.

Managing talent requires a professionally trained management. It requires, inter alia, hiring, training, retaining and retraining talented individuals. To give it due credit, PCB certainly has good eyes for hiring good talent early on. PCB’s management is partly, but not entirely, at fault for all that ails Pakistan’s cricket.

An unprofessional management cannot be expected to perform professionally. Except for one or two people in its management team, PCB lacks people who have a record of displaying hunger for success at international level. Most of them have nothing to show for the positions they hold. Their record simply cannot inspire success. They are not cut out to manage for success.

Failure to plan is planning to fail. Pakistan’s cricket since Imran’s departure from the scene in the early 1990s aptly fits this idiom. Despite having an outside share of world’s top cricket talent pool, we have failed to make the impact we should have. We have also won just one major title since 1992. Imran did not even have Waqar available in the 1992 World Cup and throughout his career captained much less talented teams than today’s. Pakistan used to win during his days largely as a result of his hunger for winning, his willingness to risk losing, his inimitable management skills and an uncanny ability to find, nurture, and utilise talent to its fullest. Imran did not have excess talent at his disposal like we have today that affords us the ability to leave out a top-notch bowler like Mohammad Asif from a Champions Trophy semi-final game against a lesser opponent (and still lose).

What’s wrong? In the corporate world, it would probably be considered an open-and-shut case of inability of the managers to close the deal. The lesson is simple: PCB should look hard for good openers but look harder for good closers. As all managers know, only people who close the deal deliver results.

The Pakistan team needs an unflinching belief in being able to beat any other. Most members of PCB’s current management cannot instill this belief in the players as they fail to inspire others from their own past. PCB management needs to be incessantly reminded by people and the media that a failure to deliver results is far more attributable to their incompetence than to the lack of talent, skill and application of the players. In the corporate world, the board’s feet are held to fire for disappointing results. Similarly, PCB’s board, not the players, should be held responsible for the team’s failures. It may not be fair to the PCB’s board all the time. But it doesn’t need to be for the greater good of cricket in Pakistan… and for the longing masses that follow it passionately looking for that fleeting moment of pleasure that eludes them in the world they subsist in.