Pakistan Cricket Shake-Up: Seven Players and Coaches Axed Mid-Tour
The numbers had been warning of a crisis for months. At Lord’s on Sunday, Pakistan finally crashed into it.
Two Tests down in England, five defeats in their last six, and a batting order in freefall, the Pakistan Cricket Board has responded with one of the most brutal mid-tour shake-ups in its modern history. Seven players have been released from the Test squad. Two senior coaches have been told to go. The message is unmistakable: nothing and no one is safe.
Seven out, seven in
The headline name is Salman Agha, the former white-ball captain, but he is far from alone. Mohammad Rizwan, Imam-ul-Haq, Ali Usman, Aamir Jamal, Muhammad Awais Zafar and Khurram Shahzad have all been sent home from the touring party in England.
This is not the usual quiet trimming of a bloated squad. It is a clear cull, cutting into the senior core of a team already out of the running for the World Test Championship final and sinking fast.
In their place, seven players have been summoned for the third Test at Birmingham, starting September 9. Three of them – Saim Ayub, Abdullah Fazal and Arafat Minhas – have already worn the Pakistan cap. Four others are uncapped: Mohammad Imran Jnr, Saad Baig, Mohammad Imran (Imran Randhawa) and Razaullah.
It is a call-up list that reads like a reset button. Fresh faces, unscarred by the recent carnage, thrown into a series Pakistan have already lost but cannot afford to ignore.
Senior men under the spotlight
The ruthlessness of the decisions becomes easier to understand when you look at the returns.
Rizwan, once the heartbeat of Pakistan’s fight in all formats, has managed 283 runs in his last 11 Test innings at 25.72, with only two fifties to show. Agha, who was expected to anchor and tough out sessions, has 221 runs at 24.55. Imam, another supposed pillar at the top, has 178 runs at 22.25 from eight innings.
These are not the numbers of a misfiring cameo player or a youngster learning on the job. These are senior men in key positions, consistently failing to hold the line.
The collective picture is even bleaker. Since January 2025, Pakistan’s batting average in Tests is 23.92 – the worst among all World Test Championship teams. That is not a blip; that is a structural collapse.
No surprise, then, that they sit rock bottom of the WTC table. No surprise either that they have gone winless in their last 18 Tests in SENA countries – South Africa, England, New Zealand and Australia – since 2018, losing 16 and drawing just two. Their last away win in those conditions came at Lord’s in May 2018, a different era in every sense.
On Sunday, at the same ground, the symmetry turned cruel. The defeat to England was Pakistan’s 10th loss in their last 11 away Tests, and it dragged their all-time Test win-loss ratio below 1 for the first time since 1987. The raw tally now reads: 153 wins, 154 defeats in 473 matches. A proud Test nation suddenly on the wrong side of history.
Hesson steps in, Sarfaraz and Gul step out
The upheaval has not stopped with the players.
In a striking mid-tour intervention, the PCB has also reshaped the coaching structure. Mike Hesson, who had been overseeing Pakistan’s white-ball set-up, has been instructed to take charge of the Test side alongside Ashley Noffke. The New Zealander is already in England and is expected to link up with the squad shortly.
Hesson’s brief is clear and unforgiving: he will lead the red-ball team for the remainder of this WTC cycle – two Tests in Sri Lanka in November, then two more in New Zealand early next year. It is a demanding run in conditions that have exposed Pakistan repeatedly over the last decade.
To clear that path, the current Test coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul have been released. Two former players, both deeply woven into Pakistan’s cricketing story, now abruptly cut away from the immediate future of the Test side.
Mid-tour coaching overhauls in England are not entirely new. The BCCI famously parachuted Ravi Shastri and his support staff – Bharat Arun, R Sridhar and Sanjay Bangar – into the 2014 tour, effectively sidelining Duncan Fletcher’s regime. But that change came after the Test series, before the white-ball leg.
Pakistan have gone a step further. The scalpel has come out in the middle of the Test series itself.
A crossroads in real time
Strip away the noise and the pattern is stark. A team with a proud Test history, now bottom of the WTC, unable to win in SENA countries, losing away almost every time they take the field, and watching its batting fold again and again.
The response from the PCB is not subtle. Seven players gone. Two coaches gone. A new head at the helm. Uncapped players drafted in for a dead rubber that suddenly feels like a live audition for the next phase of Pakistan’s Test cricket.
Birmingham will not decide a series already lost. It may, however, tell us something far more important: whether this is the start of a genuine rebuild or just another violent swing of the pendulum in a team that has spent too long lurching between extremes.
