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.
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.
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 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 21stcentury, does not 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. And cricket heads the world over fretting over things like Test cricket dying think they have it tough.
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. But 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.
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.
It might not be. 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.
Osman Samiuddin is a senior editor at ESPNcricinfo
