NEWS
Follow UsThe Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), known for taking kneejerk actions at any inconvenience, has reframed the selection committee only a few hours after their innings defeat in the Multan Test against England. The board has added Aleem Dar, Aaqib Javed, and Azhar Ali as new members, joining Asad Shafiq, the analyst Hassan Cheema, the captain and coach, who are already part of the committee.
These seven members will have a vote on the selection. There will also be four non-voting members — Azhar Mahmood (the assistant coach), Bilal Afzal (an advisor to the PCB chairman), Nadeem Khan (Director - High Performance) and Usman Wahla (Director - International Cricket).
The selection committee remains to be without a chief selector. The last designated chief selector was Wahab Riaz who witnessed series defeats against Australia and New Zealand in his brief stint that began at the end of the last year. Riaz was then first taken off the chief selector’s role and then sacked from the selection committee altogether after Pakistan’s first-round exit in the T20 World Cup. Less than a couple of weeks ago, Mohammad Yousuf resigned from the committee due to personal reasons.
PCB announced the restructured committee around an hour after the Multan Test was wrapped up. Aaqib Javed and Azhar Ali are former cricketers, with Javed having taken up various bowling coach roles in franchise cricket, Pakistan’s U19 cricket, and the national team. Dar, meanwhile, was a former first-class cricketer but is more renowned for his umpiring career, which ran for 24 years at the international level.
Dar, 56, is still an active umpire in domestic cricket and had announced that the ongoing 2024/25 season will be his last as an umpire.
With the defeat in the first Test, Pakistan have now become the first team ever to lose a Test by an innings after scoring over 500 runs in the first innings. To make it worse, this is their sixth Test defeat in a row under the new captain, Shan Masood and the fourth successive defeat at home against England. Pakistan have not won a Test match at home since February 2021.
The new committee will begin their duties by picking the squad for the second Test (also in Multan) starting on Tuesday (October 15). The main questions they will have to tackle would be the situation around Masood’s captaincy, Babar Azam’s batting form and the inability of their seam attack to make inroads.
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