It may not have quite sunk in, so let us be clear about it. Pakistan, one of the game’s giants, a team that has boasted names like Hanif and Fazal, Imran and Miandad, Wasim and Waqar, has been knocked out of the World Cup – and not by one of cricket’s superpowers, but by a team you had never heard of. Who knew it would come to this.

The shame has been so devastating, one of us has died. Yes, he was one of us. He was genuinely invested in Pakistan’s World Cup campaign, and he paid for it with his life.

While our players surrendered at the sight of grass on the pitch, while cricket chief Nasim Ashraf scrambled doing damage control, while our captain stood in disgrace, Bob Woolmer took the failure to heart. He may have been English, but from this colossal disaster, he has emerged as the one true Pakistani.

A badly governed enterprise will have a bad outcome, no matter how talented its workforce. Cricket is no different. For the last seven years, cricket in Pakistan has been governed without a constitution, headed by unaccountable individuals who have ingratiated themselves with our country’s head of state.

Nasim Ashraf, the latest in this line-up, has a lot to answer for. He promised a PCB constitution by January 31, 2007, but we are well into March and there’s no sign of it. What a blatant betrayal, yet it seems to rest easily on his shoulders.

This man badly misunderstood his job. He inserted himself into practice sessions and strategy meetings, and forced his opinion into cricketing decisions. That’s like a hospital administrator telling his doctors what diagnostic tests to use and which medicines to prescribe. He should have left the cricket to the cricketers. The result is that from now on, Nasim Ashraf’s name will be forever linked to the darkest episode of Pakistan’s cricket history. Perhaps that is punishment enough.

What needs to be done is no mystery. The starting point is a cricket board whose affairs are governed by a set of inviolable rules and principles that everyone agrees upon.

In seven long years, President Musharraf’s appointees have failed to produce such a constitution. Yet Imran Khan says he can come up with an effective PCB constitution within half an hour. The ad hoc line-up on one side and Imran, the architect of Pakistan’s golden cricket years, on the other – who would you rather believe?

The truth is that the existing PCB constitution – the one that got suspended on July 17, 1999, through political favoritism – is just fine.

It gives proper representation to regional cricket associations, forces the board’s chairman to share power with a 15-member executive council, and holds the system accountable to a general body comprising entities that field teams in Pakistan’s domestic first-class season.

The only drawback is that Pakistan’s head of state is enshrined as the board’s patron, and the chairman is his appointee instead of being elected by the general body. Short of this niggle, which is unique to the Pakistani system, the charter looks the same as the constitutions of other cricket boards such as Australia, England, or South Africa.

So here’s the answer: restore the PCB constitution, amend it to eliminate the omnipotence of the head of state, and then please stick to it. This is the only way to institutionalize our cricket and save it from decline. Chairmen of the ad hoc committee, who have been running PCB affairs through presidential fiat while the constitution remains suspended, have no interest in restoring the constitution because it will spell an end to their tenure. Since the current arrangement leaves them unaccountable, nothing changes.

At this point, unfortunately, the solution turns murky. Pakistan cricket can only be saved by a properly implemented PCB constitution, which will require presidential decree, but this seems a bad time to be bothering our President, who has picked some unwanted fights and doesn’t even know what is happening in his own capital.

We could turn to Imran and Miandad, our immortal cricketing icons, but they have done so much for us on the field, how long will we keep asking them to bail us out? Of course we could always turn to America, like we usually do, but the Americans are even more clueless about cricket than they are about Iraq.

That leaves us little choice but to raise our hands in prayer. We have sinned, we have blood on our hands, yet even sinners can hope.

To quote Faiz Ahmed Faiz, aaiye haath uthaaen hum bhi, hum, jinhe rasm-e-dua yaad nahin (Come, we must pray, yes, even we, who have forgotten the act of prayer). God help Pakistan cricket, God help Pakistan.