Pakistan does it again: cricketing idiocy at its very best

If there was a Razzie for the worst cricketing team to have ever numbed our senses, the award would have gone to the Pakistan team, every year, every time. It is difficult to even coin a name for what their Board has done now, having fined nearly half the team and banned the other half. Further, nearly every cricketing expert believes this is to be another PCB histrionic wherein the players will be reinstalled much before they pay their dues or complete their sentences. Why? Simply because this is how Pakistani cricket is run and this time too, we have no reason to believe otherwise. If an innocent Pakistani were to look at the present situation, though it is difficult to believe that there are any people who don’t realize the depths to which their team has fallen, it would seem that there is simply no player in the national team who isn’t charged of either indiscipline, camping against senior or juniors, taking sides, tampering with balls, speaking against higher authorities or even doping…phew!!

Afridi for full-time captaincy?

I must have heard it wrong or there is something even more wrong with Pakistani cricket than I had imagined until now. If reports are to be believed some folks in the PCB are planning to make Shahid Afridi as Pakistan’s permanent skipper. I don’t have anything personal about the guy — that might be the general impression since I am a hardcore Indian cricket fan, but I don’t think he is even close to having the temperament that international skippers are supposed to have. For starters, I doubt his presence in all formats of the game not because he isn’t a decent player but simply because it just doesn’t look that he is pushing himself to establish himself
as a comprehensive international player. He has never been seen complaining about the lack of test matches he has played or the careless manner in which he has repeatedly got out just when the team looked like winning an ODI game. Add to this, the fact that he has never been consistent at any place in the long list of batting order swaps that have been hurled at him, make him a very susceptible kind of batter… destructive yes, but consistent enough to lead by example — I very seriously doubt… at best he is a T20 captain since owing responsibility is not really emphasized upon in the T20 format.