I have been watching Pakistan cricket for as long as I can remember. I have seen the highs, the lows, and everything in between. I know what it feels like to watch Pakistan beat India in a knockout game and lose to a team we had no business losing to three days later.
Like most Pakistani fans, I used to blame the players. The captain made the wrong call. The batsman played a reckless shot. The bowler had a bad day. But over the years I started asking a different question. What if the players are not the real problem? What if the system they are playing inside is so broken that even the best talent in the world would struggle within it?
That is what we are talking about today. Eight mistakes that have been dragging Pakistan cricket down for years. Mistakes that everyone quietly knows about but nobody wants to say out loud.
1. Selection Based on Connections, Not Merit
Let me be direct about this one. Pakistan's selection process has always had a transparency problem and most fans already know it. Every time a new PCB chairman walks through the door, he brings a new set of selectors. And those selectors bring their own people. It is not always about who is performing the best. It is about who knows whom.
Somewhere in Karachi right now, a young batsman is grinding out 500 runs in domestic cricket, sleeping in cheap hotels, playing on rough pitches, doing everything right. And he still does not get a call. Meanwhile, someone else with the right last name or the right contact walks into the national squad. We have all seen it. We just never say it loud enough.
The saddest part is not just that deserving players get ignored. It is that after a while, they stop believing the system will ever give them a fair chance. And that belief dies long before their talent does.
Think about Fawad Alam. This man scored mountains of runs in domestic cricket for over a decade. Eleven years. He was ignored, overlooked, and written off more times than anyone should have to go through. When he finally got his shot, he scored a hundred on comeback. A hundred. And people still argued about whether he deserved to be there. That tells you everything about how this system treats its own.
2. We Keep Burning Out Our Fast Bowlers
God gave Pakistan fast bowlers the way He gave Brazil footballers. It is just there, naturally, generation after generation. Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akhtar. These were not just cricketers. They were events. When they ran in to bowl, something was about to happen.
And we keep wasting that gift. We take these young extraordinary athletes and run them into the ground. No proper rest between series. No rotation. No one sitting down and saying this 22 year old has bowled 800 overs in 18 months, maybe we should be careful here. We just keep playing them until something snaps. And then we act surprised when it does.
Shaheen Shah Afridi was carrying Pakistan's bowling attack almost single-handedly for a long stretch. He played through fatigue, through discomfort, through a schedule that would have broken most people. Then came the knee injury and months on the sidelines. Now you can see Naseem Shah heading down a similar road. We know this pattern. We have watched it before. And we are doing absolutely nothing to stop it.
3. The Batting Order That Nobody Can Figure Out
Here is a simple question. Who bats at number three for Pakistan? Take your time. Because the answer changes depending on which match you are watching, which format it is, who the captain is, and what mood the management happens to be in that week.
Every successful team in world cricket is built around a stable batting order. Kohli knows where he bats. Smith knows where he bats. They walk out to the middle with confidence because they have done it hundreds of times. That familiarity builds something real. It builds trust in yourself and clarity about your role within the team.
Pakistan takes a batsman who is just starting to settle at one position and moves him somewhere else. Then moves him back. Then tries someone completely new. The players are not the problem here. You simply cannot settle into a role that keeps shifting underneath you.
The 2022 T20 World Cup says it all. Pakistan went in trying different combinations, shuffling the order, never looking settled. Australia walked in knowing exactly what they were doing and why. They won the tournament. Pakistan went home early. The connection between clarity and results is really not that complicated.
4. The PCB Runs on Politics, Not Cricket
Imagine working somewhere where every couple of years your entire management changes completely. Your boss changes, their boss changes, the whole structure changes. Every new person has different ideas, different people they trust, and zero interest in continuing what the last person built. How much could you actually achieve in that environment?
That is exactly what Pakistani cricketers live with. The PCB chairmanship has changed hands so many times in the last decade that keeping count feels pointless. Each new chairman arrives with a new vision, a new team, and a habit of dismantling whatever came before them. And each departure leaves behind confusion, resentment, and a squad that has to start rebuilding trust all over again from nothing.
When Ramiz Raja took over, everything changed overnight. Coaching staff, selection approach, team culture, all of it. Then when Najam Sethi came back, it all changed again. These are not small adjustments. These are complete resets. And you cannot build a winning cricket team when the entire foundation keeps getting torn up every two years.
5. Domestic Cricket Is Being Left to Die
Every strong cricket nation invests heavily in its domestic structure. England's County Cricket is serious, competitive, and well funded. India's Ranji Trophy has produced some of the toughest players in the world because the competition inside India itself is genuinely brutal. Australian Shield cricketers know that if they slow down, someone else takes their spot within a fortnight.
Pakistan has first-class cricket too. But the money is not there, the media attention is not there, and the respect is not there either. Young players naturally follow the glamour and the income into T20 leagues. Nobody can blame them for that. But the consequence is a generation of cricketers who have never really learned to grind through a long innings or plan across five days. Those skills only come from domestic red-ball cricket and we are quietly letting that pipeline run dry.
Fawad Alam kept performing in that domestic structure even when nobody was watching or caring. But for every Fawad Alam who persisted long enough to finally get noticed, there are probably hundreds of others who gave up or were simply never seen by the right people at the right time. The domestic system should be a conveyor belt of tested, ready talent. Right now it feels more like a waiting room that nobody bothers to check.
6. We Throw Away Our Legends Instead of Learning From Them
Younis Khan is one of the greatest batsmen Pakistan has ever produced. Full stop. His record needs no defence. Misbah ul Haq led Pakistan through one of the most difficult periods in the team's history with real dignity and remarkable consistency. Shahid Afridi gave Pakistani fans some of the most electric moments this sport has ever produced.
And when their time was done, we essentially showed them the door and moved on. No real transition plan. No structured mentoring role. No genuine attempt to keep that hard-earned knowledge inside the system. We said thanks for playing and let decades of experience walk straight out with them.
Look at what India did with Rahul Dravid. One of the most respected Test batsmen of all time, and they brought him back to coach the under-19 team before eventually handing him the national side. His knowledge did not disappear when he retired from playing. It got passed on deliberately and carefully. Pakistan has never really figured out how to do that.
Every young Pakistan batsman coming through today has to figure out Test cricket largely on his own. There is no Younis Khan in the dressing room telling him how to build an innings on a difficult pitch in tough conditions abroad. That kind of knowledge cannot be googled. It can only be passed down. And we keep throwing it away.
7. Nobody Is Talking About Mental Health
Playing cricket for Pakistan is not just a job. It is a weight that very few people in the world will ever fully understand. You are representing 220 million people who care deeply, sometimes too deeply, about every single ball. A bad shot does not just cost you a wicket. It costs you your reputation, your social media comments, and often your place in the team the following week.
Most major cricket boards now have sports psychologists on their staff. Players have access to professionals who help them manage pressure, work through bad form, and stay mentally sharp over a long international schedule. In Pakistan, when a player struggles, the usual response is to drop him quietly and move on to the next option.
We forget that these are human beings. Young men who grew up dreaming about wearing the green jersey and who now carry an entire nation's expectations on their shoulders with very little behind them in the way of actual support.
Think about what Umar Akmal could have been with the right people around him. The talent was never in question. Anyone who saw him bat in his early years knew something special was there. But talent without the right environment eventually collapses under its own weight. And that is exactly what happened, slowly and painfully, in front of all of us.
8. Foreign Coaches Over Local Knowledge
Hiring a foreign coach is not automatically a bad decision. Some of the best coaching relationships in cricket history have crossed cultural lines and produced great results. The problem in Pakistan is the thinking behind those hirings. We bring in foreign coaches not because we have identified a specific gap or a clear plan, but because it looks like we are doing something. It signals action without requiring any honest thinking about what is actually broken.
Meanwhile the people who genuinely understand Pakistani cricket, the ones who played here, grew up here, and know the specific weight of wearing this jersey, keep getting pushed aside. Waqar Younis, Inzamam ul Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed. These are serious cricket minds with serious experience. But they get hired, fired, and replaced by someone who has never set foot in a Pakistani dressing room before arriving as head coach.
Misbah ul Haq was handed the roles of head coach and chief selector at the same time. That is an enormous and frankly unrealistic amount of responsibility for any one person. When results did not go the right way, all the blame landed on him personally. Nobody stopped to ask whether the structure itself was the problem. Nobody ever does. They just find someone to blame and move on. Sound familiar?
The Honest Truth
Pakistan does not have a cricket talent problem. If you have ever watched a local game in any city in this country you already know that. The talent is everywhere. It is in the streets, on the open grounds, in kids who have never owned proper batting gloves but can still bat better than most people you will ever watch.
What Pakistan has is a system that keeps getting in the way of that talent. A system built on politics rather than merit. A system that burns through people, ignores hard-earned experience, and resets itself every few years before anything can properly take root and grow.
The players are not the problem. They never really were. And until the right people are honest enough to admit that, we will keep having the exact same conversation after every early tournament exit.
The talent coming through right now deserves better. It is about time we gave it to them.
What do you think needs to change first in Pakistan cricket? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.