DateLine: 26th August 2009

It has been my considered view that the Chairman of PCB should not be held personally responsible for the performance of the Pakistan Cricket Team. The management of the Cricket Board requires much more. Having selected the best professional individuals to assist him the selected Directors or whatever should be delegated the authority to be the first line of response to any criticism against their individual departments. Thus if a team is not performing up to scratch The Selection Committee must be answerable and so on. This does not mean that a Chairman does not carry the can, in fact if an organization falls badly it behooves the boss to depart of his own accord. That is usually the mark of a good administrator. In the system described it is also essential that as and when one section of his organization excels the credit must be passed on directly to the group concerned and cannot be latched onto enroute. The system does not work if the Chairman uses one victory to prove his competence and a big loss to be passed onto to the players through one scheme or another.

For some years now the Chairmen of the PCB have been depending on the players to keep them in their positions and have not been able to manage the organization through competence and know how. This firstly led to too much player power ending in a situation where the Captain was all powerful. If you did not line up to his way of thinking there was little chance of you having a fixed place in the side. Ability did not matter. The system worked until the great players started to age and then truly began to impact on the performance of the team. The result; fiasco in the Windies World Cup.

This kind of management also had other limitations in that it cost us some great players. There is on record a case where special treatment to a bowler who called the Chairman 'dad' resulted in Pakistan losing a match winning bowler to indiscipline.

Each successive Chairman over the last ten years or so has made every effort to re-invent the wheel. Endless meaningless conferences and seminars have been held at vast expense to sort out domestic cricket. It is by now apparent that the aim was only to create a perception of progress else by now if we had followed any scheme with good intent it would have corrected itself to start to improve matters.

We have now arrived at a point where even the losing Captain is blaming it all on the domestic system. Let us think pause for a moment and consider, and I quote a leading cricketer who knows his cricket; "when in Sri Lanka they prepared a pacy wicket, it exposed our batsmen and when they prepared a batting wicket it exposed our bowlers". One cannot get more accurate then that.

The current management has been around for long enough to have at least initiated some reforms that were necessary. Regrettably one problem of management after another is keeping the Chairman in a state of imbalance and unable to concentrate on making the most of the great depth and wealth of talent that exists in Pakistan. Just who do we blame? It must be due to 'Global Warming!

(Article: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author only.
Copyright © 2009 Cdr. Malik Arshed Gilani)