Pakistan are in a state of flux. Amid all of the chaos, blame and justification are being directed at every possible place possible. Adding to this is the startling stats that emphasis just how far the national team has fallen.
Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chairman Mohsin Naqvi has hit back at the growing criticism of Pakistan cricket, questioning whether a few defeats should be enough to declare the sport in the country "finished" while pointing to India's recent T20I loss to Ireland as an example of how even top sides can suffer unexpected setbacks.
Speaking to the media in London, Naqvi defended the PCB's controversial decisions during Pakistan's disastrous Test tour of England and insisted that the team's recent struggles should be viewed in the wider context of its improving white-ball record.
"Let me ask you one thing: South Africa lost to Namibia, and India lost to Ireland. Has cricket ended there as well?" Naqvi said.
The PCB chief's reference to India came as he sought to push back against those who have questioned Pakistan's direction following back-to-back heavy defeats in the Test series against England.
"Yes, one thing is important: whoever we need here, we will definitely bring in. If someone is not clicking or not performing, then what can we do? Every match and every series is important for us," he added.
Pakistan suffered an innings-and-103-run defeat in the opening Test before losing the second match at Lord's by 194 runs. The results handed England an unassailable 2-0 lead in the three-match series and triggered a major overhaul of the touring squad .
The PCB released seven players — Mohammad Rizwan; Imam-ul-Haq; Salman Ali Agha; Ali Usman; Aamir Jamal; Muhammad Awais Zafar and Khurram Shahzad — ahead of the Birmingham Test; while bringing in several younger players.
Naqvi defended the sweeping changes and rejected claims that Pakistan cricket had reached its lowest point. "You used to be ranked eighth in ODIs, which has now gone up to fifth. You have had six ODI series, out of which you have won four but still, our cricket is finished?" he said.
"Our success rate has gone up from 24% to 73% and I'm not talking about just one or the other specific match, but still, our cricket is finished?"
Pakistan currently sit fifth in the ODI rankings and sixth in T20Is, according to Naqvi, who argued that rebuilding a struggling side could not happen overnight. "It is not possible to take a team from number nine to number one in three or six months. There is a long way to go," he said.
Naqvi was particularly scathing about those who have criticised the PCB and its handling of the team; saying he was not opposed to criticism but questioning the credentials of some of his detractors.
"I have never been afraid of criticism and I never will be," he said. "Those players who have never achieved anything in their lives, when they talk along these lines, that's unreasonable."
He said he regularly sought opinions from former cricketers and would accept criticism when it came from respected figures.
"If a great player like Wasim Akram spoke, I would take it seriously," Naqvi said, while insisting that some critics were more interested in targeting him personally than addressing Pakistan cricket's problems.
At the same time, Naqvi acknowledged that the PCB had made mistakes, particularly in selection, and said he was willing to take responsibility. "Sometimes there are mistakes made in selection as well. I am answerable for that, and we need to work on it," he said.
The board's selection decisions have come under further scrutiny after it issued notices to selection committee members: Aaqib Javed; Misbah-ul-Haq and Asad Shafiq; seeking explanations over the recommendations of Rizwan and Imam.
Misbah subsequently decided to resign from the selection committee.
The changes have drawn strong criticism from former Pakistan cricketers, fans and analysts. However, Naqvi said he wasn't concerned by the backlash and maintained that the decisions during the England tour were necessary.
He said he was also examining issues beyond the team's poor performances but believed it wasn't the right time to discuss matters unrelated to cricket. While acknowledging Pakistan's disappointing Test results, Naqvi pointed to improvements in the team's white-ball cricket during his tenure.
"I have never been afraid of criticism and I never will be. Those who say cricket has been destroyed since I came - look at what the rankings were before," he said as quoted by Geo News.
The board replaced them with five uncapped players, along with Saim Ayub and Abdullah Fazal, who together have only 10 matches of experience. The new players include: Arafat Minhas; Mohammad Imran Jnr.; Saad Baig; Mohammad Imran Randhawa and Razaullah.
The PCB also made changes to the coaching staff, bringing in Mike Hesson as head coach and Ashley Noffke as bowling coach. Both are already part of Pakistan's white-ball coaching set-up. Sarfaraz Ahmed and Umar Gul were released from their respective coaching roles.
Former Pakistan batter, Basit Ali, has claimed that a fallout between Babar Azam and Shaheen Shah Afridi over the captaincy played a major role in the national team’s decline.
Basit’s comments came after Pakistan’s miserable showing in England, where they have already surrendered the three-match Test series 2-0 following a 194-run defeat at Lord’s. The visitors have faced widespread criticism for their performances, with the team struggling to show any fight in either of the opening two Tests.`
According to Basit, however, Pakistan’s problems go much deeper than the current results. He believes the leadership dispute between two of the country’s senior players created a damaging divide within the setup.
"Babar Azam is not a strong captain. I am not speaking about this based on the performance in England. He has made many wrong decisions. The main reason for Pakistan cricket's downfall is the rift between Shaheen and Babar. When there was a falling-out between the two over the captaincy, Pakistan cricket was ruined that day," Ali said on the ‘Game Plan’ show."
He also suggested that the consequences of the dispute are still visible in Pakistan cricket.
"Many statements were made, saying Shaheen is a very good bowler and Babar is a very good batter."
Babar stepped down as captain after Pakistan’s disappointing campaign in India, with Shaheen subsequently handed the ODI leadership. However, after Pakistan’s poor results in New Zealand, Babar returned to the captaincy.
His second stint didn't last long either. Babar was removed again after Pakistan failed to reach the semi-finals of the 2024 T20 World Cup.
The constant reshuffling has now left Pakistan with separate captains across formats. Babar leads the Test side; Shaheen is the ODI captain and Salman Ali Agha is in charge of the T20I team.
Basit believes the damage caused by the earlier captaincy dispute can't be ignored while assessing Pakistan’s current struggles.
While Babar remains Pakistan’s Test captain, Shaheen hasn't been part of the red-ball set-up and is currently out of favour in Test cricket. Babar took over as Test captain from Shan Masood earlier this year. Under his leadership, Pakistan drew a two-match Test series against the West Indies.
However, his own batting form in the longest format remains a concern. Babar has gone four years without scoring a Test century; adding to the pressure surrounding his leadership as Pakistan prepare for the final Test at Edgbaston.
The 1960s were a bad decade for Pakistan cricket. The newbie bounce of the '50s - when, after gaining full membership, Pakistan famously and unprecedentedly won a Test in each of the three countries they toured for the first time - was gone. Some of the stars who had led them through those early years had either retired or were fading.
Pakistan only played 30 Tests in the entire decade; the fewest of all teams. Twice in that time, they went two years without playing a single Test. In the entire decade they won only two Tests.
Some losses were apocalyptic; most notably the 4-0 thumping in England in 1962. This became a kind of template for future disaster tours. Even the non-losses, like the 0-0 stalemate in India, were doom-laden; the manager's damning report of that series led to a mass cull.
The limited number of Tests didn't stop them churning through six captains as they struggled to replace Abdul Hafeez Kardar, the towering, seminal leader of that first decade. The board didn't seem to understand that if not quite irreplaceable; Kardar was impossible to replicate.
The bowling, without Fazal Mahmood, was a mess. The batting, Hanif Mohammad apart, was a hotter mess. A seismic change at domestic level, in which matting wickets - on which Pakistan had excelled - were replaced by regular turf wickets had seen to that. It was a necessary change but the transition was painful.
Domestic cricket was underdeveloped and there was no money - or even thought of it - and the talent pipelines were dry. The decade is widely acknowledged to be the lowest point in the sport's history in Pakistan. Over subsequent years, it has been challenged and never more sternly than now.
Pakistan's 104-run defeat in Dhaka was their third Test loss to Bangladesh on the bounce. No team other than Zimbabwe has lost three consecutive Tests to Bangladesh. Unlike Bangladesh's 2-0 win in Pakistan in 2024, this was not a shock or against the run of form. They bossed it from start to end; like a team at home might against a distinctly inferior side.
It was Pakistan's sixth Test loss in a row away from home; the last time they won an away Test was in Sri Lanka nearly three years ago. At home, they have won one of their last seven Test series and as well as that series loss to Bangladesh in 2024;, they lost a first home Test to West Indies in 34 years. In the last World Test Championship table, they finished bottom. In the current cycle; they sit seventh.
In the 1960s, of course, there was no white-ball cricket to provide a potential escape clause for how we might remember that time. Today, Pakistan's performances in white-ball cricket only add fuel to this fire. They haven't qualified for the knockout stage of an ICC event in their last four attempts.
They went winless in a home ICC event. They lost to USA in an ICC event. More days than not, their white-ball teams look as though they are suspicious of 21st-century cricket.
In Tests at least, we aren't talking about a young, transitionary side. Instead, it's a strangely composed one that is neither forward-looking nor built from a sturdy past. Think of an inverse of the skinny-fat body type. On the surface they look like veterans because eight of the XI that lost in Dhaka are 30 or over and three are 35 or over. Six of them debuted more than seven years ago.
Yet, they are actually very unestablished. Seven of that XI were playing between their 22nd and 34th Tests; none had played 50. It is exactly the kind of mishmash XI, of stalled, interrupted and stagnated careers, you'd expect after years and years of very poor player management.
There are promising new players; in this team and in the system. That is not the problem. The problem is that the national team is demonstrably the worst place to be for them to maximise their potential.
It is a genuinely corrosive and regressive environment, where players are fined for losing games; arbitrarily dropped from one format for poor form in another; where injuries are badly managed; where no thought or care seems to be given, let alone an ecosystem or infrastructure provided, to combat stagnation or deterioration.
Ordinarily, this would be enough to make the case that Pakistan cricket has never been at a lower ebb. What makes it watertight is the knowledge that on-field performances don't emerge from a vacuum.
Admittedly, performances on the field aren't always synced with governance off it; as West Indies and Sri Lanka have also proved in the past. Indeed, one of the enduring joys of cricket has been when Pakistan have played as if divorced entirely from the reality of their board's malfunctions, a little like that cute myth about bumblebees not knowing they are not built to fly and so they fly anyway.
It's just that in this moment, Pakistan's on-field results feel more than ever like they're catching up to the continuing degradation in the way the game is run off it. The PCB is currently on its fifth chair in just under five years.
Eleven different men have called themselves head coach or something similar; of a Pakistan men's side in this time. Meanwhile, math has lost count of the number of selectors and support staff they have used.
It is more intrinsic than just churn, though. The very nature of the board is changing. Dysfunction has always been baked into the PCB but it used to be that it was difficult to decide whether the board was a public body with a private spirit or a private body with a public spirit. That is now moot. These days the PCB is a government institution, and not just because the country's interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, is the chair.
A number of the most critical positions in the board are now taken up by civil servants on deputation, which, in the 21st century, doesn't come across as the optimal approach to running the country's most popular and commercially valuable sport.
Pakistanis have seen this kind of institutional decline before, most resonantly with PIA, a once-soaring national airline that has slowly but surely been grounded by the sheer weight of political appointments. Closer to the bone, they have seen hockey, once as popular as cricket, wither away to the point where the hockey federation can't pay players or even afford to send them to tournaments.
At the same time, all power has accrued to the very top, into the chair. This is the outcome of a process that began under Ramiz Raja, when he took over from Ehsan Mani as chair and formalised by Najam Sethi who replaced Ramiz.
Sethi brought back an older constitution in which the chair is effectively the executive and there is no CEO. This structure isn't new. The PCB has operated like this before. It's just that the current chair is unique, in being a sitting - and very senior - minister.
His day job keeps him plenty occupied. For instance, with the diplomatic efforts in Islamabad recently to prevent World War III from breaking out, which took place, inconveniently, in the middle of the PSL.
The 11th season of the PSL (Pakistan Super League) did prove private equity is still willing to invest in cricket. The two new franchises are the most expensive and the new broadcast deal is the biggest.
Murmurs persist of a financial strain in that ecosystem, of a stark dissonance between the headline numbers of these deals and the actual state of a market tasked with feeding those numbers.
The PCB's financial position is unknown because no annual financial statement has been made public since 2023. Until then, the board's finances were in decent order. The PSL was bringing in money, the annual revenue distributed from the ICC was healthy and about to double and reserves were plentiful.
Since then, there's been little transparency but growing concern about the immediate future. Those reserves, after significant - albeit much needed - stadium renovations at major venues, have been hit. Broadcast deals for Pakistan's bilateral international cricket have plummeted to an irrelevance. The forecast for the ICC's next rights deal is gloomy, so incoming distributions are expected to be considerably reduced.
At the same time, the PCB seems to have become a shrinking presence within the ICC, unless there is an India angle at play. It is understandable - maybe even unavoidable - given the way the ICC itself is reorienting and the geopolitics surrounding that reorientation.
There seems little evidence that the PCB has been busy buffering itself with alliances or involving itself in governance itself (across 13 different ICC sub-committees, only one has a PCB official). It's not that they are making enemies, just that it seems, by several accounts, they are almost invisible. The next Future Tours Programme, a decent measure of bilateral relations, will tell us more. The proviso being that the worse the team performs; the less attractive they become as an opponent on the field.
This is happening at the worst possible time, given the major reset the game is facing. The flight of money away from international cricket, an incoming correction in the broadcast-rights market, the growth of franchise leagues where Pakistan's players face exclusion: combating this requires deeper - and deeply informed - engagement from the PCB, of a kind that has not been recently evident.
The mind can't help but go back to the mid-to-late 2000s, another period that could reasonably be argued to have been Pakistan's lowest. That began with the forfeiting of the Oval Test; contained multiple doping scandals; captaincy and administrative shuffles; Bob Woolmer's death; the Lahore terror attacks and ensuing exile and ended with the spot-fixing crisis.
Well, that phase felt like a quick succession of high-speed - and high-volume - crashes. There was barely any time to comprehend one before another hit and then another and another and Pakistan still won the 2009 T20 World Cup and then one day Misbah-ul-Haq and his merry band of misfits were ambulancing the team to the top.
By contrast, this is a quieter, slower-paced unthreading, hidden away in the margins of a shifting international game. Pakistan cricket has not been rocked by a massive crisis as much as by the gentle confluence of its own incremental decline with the direction of the global game. Both directions seem irreversible, which is primarily what gives this period that terminal sense.
The Misbah era is a happy reminder of the dawn that comes after even the darkest nights, as were the 1970s. That decade not only reversed the stagnation and despair of the 1960s, it reshaped Pakistan cricket forever, paving the way for their greatest days. A bliss to imagine these years might also preface something more joyful ahead, though at this precise moment, it is written more in hope and prayer than expectation.
For a nation that has largely been extremely successful in Test cricket, recent numbers are a major reversal. In the 1980s and 1990s, Pakistan cut it with the very best, and were the only team who consistently matched up against West Indies: in those two decades, their win-loss ratio of 1.617 (55 wins, 34 defeats) was next only to West Indies' 2.027, among teams who played at least 75 Tests during this period.
Fast forward to the current era, and Pakistan are scraping the barrel. In the 2020s their win-loss numbers have dropped to 16-24, and in the last four-and-a-half years it's even worse: 8-20 since the start of 2022, the poorest among all teams with a 20-Test cut-off. In fact, the two teams who ruled in the 1980s and '90s are now right at the bottom, with West Indies only marginally better at 9-20.
The string of defeats over the last few years has also brought about another significant statistical shift: for the first time since their first Test match in 1952, Pakistan's win-loss ratio has slipped below that of their archrivals India. The difference, admittedly, is in the third decimal - India's 187-188 record gives them a ratio of 0.994 - but it represents a huge change for a team that had always had the best Test numbers among their Asian rivals.
So how did Pakistan suffer such a decline? Let's look at the key numbers that throw light on how Pakistan lost their way in Test cricket.
In truth, Pakistan's Test team has been in decline for a while now: in 12 of the last 19 years
since 2007 - they played no Tests in 2008 - they have lost more matches than they have won; since 2016, they've had eight such years out of 11. Just before that, in July 2006, their win-loss differential was the joint-highest it's ever been in their Test history: +18, with 100 wins to 82 defeats in 321 matches.
Till 2015, that differential remained at a respectable 15, with 126 wins to 111 defeats. From 2016, the decline accelerated rapidly; as illustrated by a 27-43 record that has wiped out the credit balance in the win-loss sheet and put them in the red.
The beginning of that phase was also when the Younis Khan-Misbah-ul-Haq duo was on their last legs - they retired in May 2017 - and since then most aspects of Pakistan's Test cricket have disintegrated. This period also coincided with India's tremendous rise, during which they won almost twice as many Tests as they lost (61-30).
As the break-up of these numbers illustrates; between 2016 and 2021, Pakistan struggled in the SENA countries (South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia) but made up for those numbers to a large extent with their record at home and at other overseas venues - they were 5-0 in Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and Ireland combined and 3-2 in the West Indies.
Since 2022, though, even their home numbers have nosedived to 4-9, while they have also lost 2-0 in Bangladesh and only managed a 1-1 draw in the West Indies.
In 32 Tests since the start of 2022, Pakistan have been bowled out for under 250 on 29 occasions, which is a record for them in any 32-Test block. Seventeen were sub-200 totals, which is the second-highest - the only instance of more such totals for Pakistan in a 32-Test block was in their first 32 matches, from 1952 to 1960, when there were 19 sub-200 totals.
In four innings in England so far, they have ticked both boxes each time, with totals of 110, 194, 171 and 135. On average, they have lasted 43.2 overs per innings; which means getting bowled out twice in a 90-over day. In fact, in 12 Tests since Boxing Day 2024 in Centurion, Pakistan have been bowled out for under 250 in both innings of a match five times, which illustrates just how dire the batting has been.
During this period, no Pakistan batter has scored 750-plus runs at an average of 45 or more. Saud Shakeel comes closest with 1934 runs at 42.97, while Babar Azam averages 42.82 for his 2 227 runs. In the same period, 15 batters from other teams have achieved the double of 750 runs and a 45-plus average. Contrast that with the period between 2011 and 2015, when Pakistan had seven batters meeting those two criteria in a 32-Test block.
The lack of consistency in team selection has been a consistent theme in Pakistan cricket for several years but especially so since 2022. Only twice in 32 Tests in this period have they played unchanged XIs: against Sri Lanka in Colombo in 2023 and against England in Rawalpindi in 2024. On both occasions, they won and sealed the series. They made three or more changes to their XI on 18 occasions and at least four changes on 11, more than a third of the Tests they have played since 2022.
As many as 38 players have featured in the 32 Tests Pakistan played since the start of 2022. Taking 11 players for the first of those matches, it means they have used 27 more players for the remaining 31 Tests, a rate of 0.87 new players per Test. Among the WTC teams, only South Africa have had a higher turnover rate, but that is largely because of the second-string team they sent to New Zealand for a Test series in 2023-24.
All the constant chopping and changing has meant that only seven players have featured in at least half of the matches Pakistan have played in this period, six of them top-order batters. Since Azhar Ali's retirement in December 2022, they have not fielded a player with either 5 000-plus runs or 150-plus wickets in their playing XIs.
And while 60 players have debuted for Pakistan in Tests since 2011, only one among them, Babar Azam, has played 50 Tests or scored 3 000 runs, and only Yasir Shah has taken 150-plus wickets. Compare those numbers with India's, and they look even worse: India have had 53 debutants in this period, of whom 10 have played 50-plus Tests, eight have scored 3000-plus runs, and five have taken 150-plus wickets.
I find it very interesting how far back the issues go. Prior to this, I thought it only went back to two or three years. It can be hard to trace the nexus of the problems. I highly doubt that the PCB are interested in a history lesson regarding the problems.
As with all problems, I believe that it should be tackled one part at a time. I would focus on the batting first. The performances have been sub-par; particularly in the current England series.
Batting is pivotal because it can set a benchmark for a Test that's being played. It's a tone setter.