'What's the bowling coach done?': Journalist questions PCB's mass sacking after Lord's Test, calls meltdown overreaction

'What's the bowling coach done?': Journalist questions PCB's mass sacking after Lord's Test, calls meltdown overreaction originally appeared on Cricket News. Add Cricket News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

British-Pakistani journalist Aatif Nawaz questioned the PCB's decision to sack its bowling coach after the Lord's Test.

He argued Pakistan's bowlers, not batters, were the ones taking wickets.

Nawaz called the mass overhaul a counterproductive move to placate angry fans.

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BBC journalist Aatif Nawaz wasn't sold on PCB decision

Pakistan's decision to dismantle their squad and coaching staff mid-tour has drawn criticism from many quarters, and BBC commentator Aatif Nawaz has added a pointed voice to the chorus.

Appearing on the For The Love Of Cricket podcast alongside Stuart Broad and Jos Buttler, he took particular aim at one element of the purge.

After the 2-0 series defeat was confirmed at Lord's, the PCB sent home seven players and released head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul ahead of the dead-rubber third Test at Edgbaston. Five uncapped players were drafted in as replacements.

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Nawaz accepted the batting had been unacceptable, with Pakistan unable to pass 200 across four innings in the series, but questioned whether the scale of the response bore any relation to where the problems actually lay.

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Why Aatif Nawaz questioned the bowling coach's sacking

The commentator singled out the removal of the bowling coach as the most baffling part of the decision, pointing out that Pakistan's attack had done its job even as the batting collapsed around it.

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"Get rid of your head coach, get rid of your bowling coach. What's the bowling coach done? His bowlers took enough. They took all the wickets," Nawaz said. "At least the bowlers at Lord's got the wickets. It just seemed like the kind of move you do when you're trying to placate the angry voices in your country."

He framed the upheaval within Pakistan's long-standing pattern of instability, noting how difficult it had become to keep track of who held which role. "It's very hard to keep track of who's the batting coach, who's the bowling coach, who's your chief selector, who's your captain, who's your vice captain," Nawaz said. "He could be captain one game and then the 12th man the next, as Salman Agha found out in this test series."

Nawaz conceded there was a narrow defence available, given the circumstances of the final Test. "It's a dead rubber. You could say if you play the same 11, they would be bound to get dominated by England again. So you have to try something drastically different. That's the defence of the move, I suppose," he said.

MORE: Pakistan cricket insider launches explosive attack on players' professionalism

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Why Nawaz fears the message it sends to red-ball hopefuls

His deeper concern was for the future rather than the present, and specifically what the treatment of players signals to the next generation, weighing up where to invest their careers.

"What kind of message are you sending to the next generation of Pakistan cricket players who want to play red-ball cricket for Pakistan? Why would they want to do that?" Nawaz asked. He believes that if there is no security in playing Tests for Pakistan, the next generation of players will simply prioritise white-ball cricket and T20.

It is a warning worth taking seriously. Pakistan already loses players to the franchise circuit, and Test cricket offers neither the money nor, on this evidence, the security of the shortest format. When a board discards seven players and two coaches in a single announcement after one bad week, it confirms exactly the fears Nawaz articulated.

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The bowling point is the one that lingers, though. Mohammad Abbas took nine wickets in the Lord's Test and earned a place on the honours board, yet the man coaching that attack lost his job days later. Whatever the batting failures, punishing the one department that functioned suggests a response driven by public anger rather than any clear reading of what went wrong.

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