Hosting a major tournament was supposed to be the culmination of years-long work to bring Pakistan entirely back into the international fold. Instead, the feeling after the Champions Trophy is of a team being pushed further into the periphery.
There’s room for sympathy towards the PCB over the scheduling debacle which saw their host status made redundant at the end of the competition. That their two losses out of two played were against both the tournament finalists might have also left space for perspective on their performance. But the perpetual chaos of PCB selection decisions makes it harder on all fronts for Pakistan to find their way out of an ever-deepening hole.
In a press conference in Lahore before the end of their marquee tournament, Salman Agha sat alongside under-fire interim head coach Aaqib Javed as their fourth official T20I captain since the beginning of last year. In acknowledging how the continued change at the top has affected on-field performance, Javed said: “We have changed nearly 16 coaches and 26 selectors in the last two years or so. You put that formula on any team in the world, I think they will also be in the same situation.”
Also read: Mohammad Rizwan - Pakistan's cricketing unpredictability down to 'cultural problems'
Enter Agha as the latest in that fire pit - appointed in direct contradiction to the stability Javed marked as key to improving on the field. He’s already captained as many matches since January 2024 as Mohammad Rizwan did (four), except without the 100-plus matches his predecessor accumulated before taking the armband. Agha has played just six T20Is, and has featured only sporadically in the PSL since making his debut in 2017. It was off the back of a decent, but not standout, season in the 2024 PSL that he broke into the T20I team, with his success in the other two formats also a factor. Now, not only does he have to step into shoes Rizwan had barely broken in himself, he also has to find success as a player in a format he is yet to nail, and lead a side shorn of its only two consistent T20I batters, with Babar Azam left out alongside Rizwan.
It’s Rizwan’s axing that is the most puzzling. No one has scored more runs (1,775) at a higher average (44.37) in T20Is than Rizwan has since the beginning of 2022. The next highest-scoring Pakistan player on that list has a full 1,000 runs less (Iftikhar Ahmed). As for players who are part of the first squad under Agha’s leadership, only one has more than 400 runs in the same time period (new vice-captain Shadab Khan), and Shan Masood (not in the squad) - who last played a T20I in 2023 - has more than any of the rest. Picking a group of young players after a tough cycle might ordinarily have clear merits of a statement of intent going into the next, but excluding a player so obviously far ahead of the rest is not only unjustifiable on a cricketing level, but a further act of the same self-harm which has led to the squad re-think in the first place.
In justifying the unjustifiable, Javed wielded the familiar stick used to routinely beat Pakistan’s most successful two batters of the last decade. “We feel that we need to bring in newer, younger players and change the style of cricket we are playing,” he said. That new style of cricket was expanded upon by Agha as “high-risk” and by Javed as “aggressive”. But to use that approach as basis for Rizwan’s exclusion is again flawed.
As a top five batter since 2022, Rizwan has a higher strike-rate than Ibrahim Zadran, Ben Stokes, Rassie van der Dussen, and is within touching distance to Virat Kohli in that regard. While the runs he’s scored have come slower than other top flight T20I openers, coming at the top of an inconsistent batting unit, often with a long tail, brings more pressure on Rizwan to bat longer at the top and score the runs that won’t be scored below him.
In their T20I squad for New Zealand, Pakistan have picked players to fill what they see as their aggression deficit, but without consideration for their run deficit. Their top-order options include Abdul Samad, who has a T20 strike-rate of 146.34 but an average of less than 20, as well as Mohammad Haris, whose last five T20I innings returned 30 runs off 36 balls.
Javed’s other rationale for Rizwan’s axing was that players needed to play domestic cricket to regain Test and ODI form rather than stay on the continuous T20 circuit. The runs Rizwan has scored across formats just in the last few months contradict that the volume of T20Is he’s playing are damaging.
The only reasoning behind the decision to drop Rizwan in particular that could be considered as some kind of logic, is that big-name droppings prevent an over-comfortable environment in order to drive performance. It fits in with the culture of fear which sees the selection committee’s finger of doom hover over names on a squad-sheet like Sauron’s eye. But don’t pretend it’s for the greater good. The pretexts given for dropping Rizwan and Babar are a thinly-veiled smokescreen which is impossible to hide behind.
All of these distorted cover stories of putting team performance above individuals create an atmosphere shrouded in cruel mystery under which it’s impossible for any group of players to perform well. Calling time on Rizwan’s T20I captaincy in favour of a clean slate from the trio of captains cycled between over the last couple of years could have had merit in establishing a clean break from the previous chaos. But dropping him from the squad completely burns through any semblance of sound reasoning, and marks the continuation of a damaging and systemically broken board which has undervalued and mistreated its best players for too long.
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