Pakistan Cricket Board Faces Backlash After Major Player Cuts
In the middle of a bruising tour of England, Pakistan’s cricket establishment reached for the axe.
A limp, heavy defeat, with barely a hint of resistance, forced the Pakistan Cricket Board into drastic action: seven players were ordered home before the tour had even finished. The clear-out did not stop there. Members of the coaching staff were cut too, among them former captain Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul, as the PCB ripped up the support structure around a struggling side.
It was a statement. And it came with a backlash.
Under fire for both the team’s results and the turbulence off the field, PCB chairman Mohsin Naqvi stepped forward to defend the direction of Pakistan cricket, even as he conceded that this is one of its most troubled periods.
Yes, performances have dipped. Yes, the England tour has exposed soft underbellies. But Naqvi is adamant Pakistan are not alone in suffering shock reverses.
“South Africa lost to Namibia, and India lost to Ireland. Has cricket ended there as well?”
he asked in a video that has spread quickly across social media, using two of the year’s most startling results as a shield against the narrative that Pakistan alone are in freefall.
His message was blunt: international cricket is unforgiving, and big teams do get ambushed. What matters, he stressed, is how ruthlessly you respond.
“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.”
That line – “if someone is not clicking” – has become a kind of mantra for this regime, and it framed his comments on one of Pakistan’s most scrutinised players of the moment, Salman Agha.
Agha, once seen as a central pillar of Pakistan’s middle order, has lost his touch at precisely the wrong time. The runs have dried up, the fluency has gone, and his place has slipped under the microscope.
“Agha is such a brilliant player, and yet he is not clicking at the moment for certain reasons,”
Naqvi said. The board, he insisted, had not simply told the batter to disappear from the scene. “We are not telling him, ‘We asked you to go and rest’; we spoke to him and did everything. So, the objective is not to remove someone from the team. The objective is that if a player is not clicking, then we should make a change.”
It is a hard-edged philosophy: sentiment out, form and results in. That approach has fuelled both the mid-tour cull and the wider debate over whether Naqvi’s tenure has stabilised Pakistan cricket or pushed it deeper into flux.
On that front, the chairman is just as combative.
“Look at what the rankings were before,”
he said, bristling at accusations that standards have collapsed on his watch. He accepts the criticism of Pakistan’s recent red-ball failures – two Test defeats that have reopened old wounds about temperament and technique – but refuses to let those losses define his administration.
“Yes, absolutely, what happened in the Test match cannot be termed wrong. We have lost these two matches,”
Naqvi admitted. The disappointment is real; the damage to reputation, obvious. Yet he quickly turned to the formats where he believes progress is undeniable.
He pointed to the white-ball numbers, the sport’s modern currency. Pakistan, he reminded critics, were languishing in the lower half of the ODI table when the current coaching setup arrived.
“Those who say cricket has been destroyed since I came – look at what the rankings were before we brought our coaching team. We were eighth in ODIs and now we're fifth, in T20Is we jumped to sixth position from ninth.”
For Naqvi, those climbs in ODI and T20I rankings are proof that the project is working, that the upheaval is not chaos but course correction. He insists he has never been afraid of scrutiny and will not start now.
The question is whether Pakistan’s players can match that defiance with performances, and whether this ruthless churn of personnel will harden the team or hollow it out as the next crucial series looms.
