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Pakistan all-rounder Azhar Mahmood writes about the appointment of Azhar Ali as the ODI captain for Pakistan, Misbah's replacement for the Test side, the PCB's hesitancy to appoint a young captain, changes needed to the domestic cricket structure, the selection criteria for the tour of Bangladesh and his thoughts on the upcoming stint at the IPL.

azhar mahmood article

By Azhar Mahmood (3rd April,2015)

 

Azhar Ali’s appointment as captain

I would ask everyone to back Azhar Ali and give him our vote of confidence. There aren’t too many people who are born leaders. This a skill that is developed over time and I would plead with everyone to give Azhar the time to settle down in his role and not get on his case even if he loses a series here and there. Now that the PCB have made this decision to appoint him as ODI captain, he needs to be given a proper run, not for just one or two series but for a long time. Don’t replace him after six months with another person. He has been chosen for a reason and deserves a reasonable stint at the helm to guide a new look team which is likely to be composed of new batsmen as our bowlers have done reasonably well in the recent past.


Misbah’s replacement for Test captain

I am a little puzzled as to why Azhar Ali wasn’t given the captaincy in Test matches in order for him to be guided by Misbah whilst having control of the team. In the current setup, we will have a situation where Misbah will take the decisions and Azhar Ali will observe which isn’t ideal. Just look at the way Sri Lanka appointed Mathews as captain, with two former captains present in the team to provide him advice. If we follow that model, then Azhar Ali would take the decisions with Misbah always present in a supervisory role. The PCB should have done this in a manner such that if there is a decision which is incorrect or is one that Azhar requires some assistance in making, then Misbah could have stepped in and helped Azhar out. I am hoping that the PCB will pay heed to this proposal and adopt this style in a few series in the future. This type of approach will be very important if the PCB is looking at the long term picture.


The hesitancy to appoint a young captain

Why can’t we appoint a junior player as a captain? Who has imposed this culture on us? I fail to understand the logic behind this thinking. If a player has the ability to lead the team, then why not take that decision? So in effect what we are saying is that we will offer the captaincy to a player regardless of his ability to lead but solely based upon his age! We heard the PCB Chairman take the example of Graeme Smith and Steven Smith as young captains and the fact that we did not have the culture which allows such appointments. But look at Steven Smith, he lead his team to wins against India and England and no one was worried about the fact that he was a stand-in captain for Michael Clarke who is a much more senior player. This kind of advanced thinking is the result of having a system in place which can concentrate on the long term future of the team. If Pakistan want to emulate this then they really have to think out of the box. They need to stop thinking of the next series but look a little bit further into the future as well. They need to think how we can change our cricket for the better and they need to worry about changing the mindset of our players.


Role of the captain and coach in selection matters

I feel that the captain of the team must be an integral part of the selection committee. You cannot have situations where the selection committee selects a group of fifteen players and then ask the captain what he thinks about that having already finalised the names. The captain needs to have a right to select the team he wants because at the end of the day, it is he who is with the team on the field. The same applies to the coach as well – let him also have a say in the selection of squads. This way, these two can be answerable to the public if the team performance is not good.


Bangladesh versus Pakistan – good to see some youngsters included

Given the fact that we have senior players like Misbah, Afridi and Younis Khan not present in the batting line-up in ODIs, you needed to replace them with some promising youngsters. In fact, if you also consider Umar Akmal who has been left out, you had the need for the selection of four new players. It's good to see some youngsters in the Pakistan squads, but for God’s sake, don’t play these youngsters and then discard them after one or two games if they don’t play well in those games. Persevere with these players or you will end up in the same place in four years’ time where you are now after the 2015 World Cup. I am a bit tired of listening to the same story since the 1999 World Cup where we talk about building a young team but always end up at the same point. Fact is, there is hardly any long term planning where we don’t seem to think about how we utilize our young players and how to give them more exposure.


Pakistan can thank their bowlers for a place in the Quarter Final of 2015 World Cup

Frankly speaking, Pakistan were pathetic at the World Cup. They can thank their bowlers like Wahab and some contribution by Misbah for whatever progress they made. When the bowling is doing the bulk of the work, then this is not a team effort. Pakistan’s highest total in the World Cup against a good quality team was 224 versus India, which is unacceptable. Apart from some divine intervention, there is no real way to explain how we got to the Quarter Final stage. None of the batsmen really performed apart from Misbah.


Changes needed at the domestic level to save the future of Pakistan cricket

Some tough decisions need to be made by the PCB here. First of all they have far too many first class teams in the mix. At the moment, we have teams of mixed ability playing each other where you have good bowling attacks coming up against weak batting and vice versa. Ideally speaking, I would like to see just ten teams through which all of Pakistan’s domestic talent can come through. With less teams the good players will need to fight for their place in the team and not consider it a right to get into one of the many teams like it is now. It has to be about quality rather than quantity when it comes to first class cricket in Pakistan.

If they cannot cut the number of teams, then at the least create two divisions, similar to the English county system, where the performance against teams in the top division should count for more than that against teams of the lower division. So, let’s take an example of two players, one who scores a thousand runs playing in a lower division and another player who scores eight hundred playing for a top division team against better quality opposition. It would be perfectly fine to prefer the top division player over the lower division player, even though there is a difference in runs scored between both players.


Pakistan need to forget about IPL and work on their own T20 tournament

I agree that Pakistan players are unable to play in the IPL due to many factors, but what is stopping Pakistan from organizing its own tournaments? But then we need to look at the quality of our current domestic T20 tournament and see how that can be improved. At the moment, we have a T20 tournament which ends in four days or so, where even losing one match is enough to get a team knocked out. There are three matches in a day held where the early one is played on a pitch with moisture and the evening one is held under dew conditions. Only the afternoon one is a decent match up. Clearly this is not the way forward.

As far as the issue of the Pakistan Super League (PSL) is concerned, it can only take place if the PCB wishes it to happen with all sincerity. Even I had a plan for such a tournament that I wanted to push for with the PCB but what it really comes down to is the will of the PCB to create their own competition if the world won’t let you take part in other tournaments. Granted that international players may not want to travel to Pakistan but there is nothing stopping the PCB from creating the tournament and demonstrating the structure and success in this venture to the world. 


Pakistan need to do more than lip service to compete with the top teams of the world

If Pakistan wish to compete with the rest of the world in cricket then they have to take some tough decisions. For example if you wish your players to have better fitness then we need to have financial rewards in domestic cricket as incentives for maintaining their fitness. We currently have a situation where a player is struggling to earn enough for a decent meal but we expect this player to improve himself and become a world beater. We are blessed with some exceptional natural talent in our country so we are able to produce good players, despite having minimal contribution in this regard from the PCB or any of the academies in the country. The effectiveness of our main academy can be judged by the fact that we have batsmen with basic issues of playing balls around their off-stump but the NCA is not able to help in that area at all!


No real basis for selecting squad for the Bangladesh tour

With Pakistan’s next international assignment round the corner, I am unable to understand how the selectors picked a squad for this tour. We have had no domestic cricket for about three months so all you can base this selection on is previous performance but there seems to be no plan around this. What should have happened is that before announcing the squad for the Bangladesh tour, the best players should have been called in and their fitness assessed at the NCA to see how they have been faring during their off time for the past three months as most of them have been doing little work and probably been sitting and watching Pakistan play in the World Cup! 

This really comes down to the inability of the PCB to plan ahead. As an example, look at how Sri Lanka went about having backups for their players in the recently concluded World Cup. They took four extra players with them to the World Cup so that they had readymade replacements for injured players who were also acclimatized to the conditions. Contrast that with our setup, when we had an injury to Mohammad Irfan, we had no idea of who to replace him with, as there had been no cricket in the country for the past three months! 


Looking forward to the stint with Kolkata Knight Riders

This is a great opportunity for me and I'm delighted to have another chance of playing at the IPL. I have played twice in the IPL before although I missed the tournament last year. KKR are the champions from last year and they have some exceptional players, many of whom are good friends as well. We also have one of the top Bollywood personalities in Shahrukh Khan who as owner of KKR takes a lot of personal interest in this team. But above all, this will be an excellent opportunity to learn even more skills and I really can’t wait to join them and get going. I'm also really looking forward to working with Wasim Akram during the IPL. It was always a pleasure to play alongside Wasim and I learnt a lot from him, now it will be a great opportunity to learn from him in his role as a bowling coach.

 

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