Mickey Arthur has been discreet since his axing as Pakistan Head Coach in August 2019.
It's not difficult to see why Mickey Arthur would hold his tongue. Firstly, at the age of 51 he still has two or three jobs left in cricket. Secondly, he knows the strengths and weaknesses of Misbah-ul-Haq intimately, and he must understand that if Misbah under-performs then Arthur's reputation will rise.
The two men are quite close in age, but are in many ways the opposite of the products that you would expect their environments to have created.
Mickey Arthur is a white South African man who is 51 years of age. He lived in the stifling conservatism of Apartheid South Africa until that system collapsed just after his 26th birthday. You would expect such a man to be an arch-conservative - even Graeme Smith, who is a generation younger, was widely mocked in Australia for his late declarations and cautious tactics.
But Mickey Arthur has never been what you would expect. His family moved to Durban, which is a city dominated economically by Indian South Africans and English-speaking South Africans, and where the ultra-conservative Afrikaaner culture is almost non-existent. In contrast with Johannesburg or Cape Town it is a city of year-round summer and it has its own distinctively English-speaking cricket culture, personified by the likes of England's Robin Smith and before that two of South Africa's three greatest cricketers - Barry Richards and Mike Procter.
It is Mickey Arthur's upbringing in the English-speaking subset of white South Africa which explains his complete lack of racial prejudice, his progressive attitude towards young players and his comfort living in an "Indian" culture.
Misbah-ul-Haq is in many ways the opposite. Socially he resembles many of the Pakistan cricketers who were household names in England in the 1970's. He shares the same family background as Imran Khan and Majid Khan and is not too dissimilar socially to Rameez Raja and Wasim Raja.
All four of those older men were university educated, but Imran and Majid Khan went to university in the UK (at Oxford, the most prestigious university) while Wasim Raja married an Englishwoman and settled in the UK.
All four of those earlier, highly educated Pakistan international cricketers were men who were cosmopolitan in their outlook and, by Pakistani standards, progressive in their outlook to both life and sport. You might expect Misbah-ul-Haq to have developed similarly but he clearly has not: here is a man who at the age of 45 sports a beard that he did not have when he reached the age of 40.
Misbah has in many ways "gone the other way". It is a fact of life that many people become increasingly cautious and conservative as they age. (As a psychiatrist, I would refer you to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzik's 2014 article in "Psychology Today" which summarized 92 separate research studies showing that as people age they take fewer risks and stick to what they are familiar with).
Misbah is probably cricket's ultimate example of advancing age creating a leader whose mind is generally closed to the introduction of youth, to the idea of constant gradual rejuvenation of a team, and who will always invest his confidence in an older player rather than back youth.
We saw all of this with Misbah's captaincy. Mickey Arthur wrote in his (earlier) book that he had had to sack Herschelle Gibbs and Shaun Pollock from the South African national team because no team can afford to lose several senior players at once and sink into a transition phase. The oldest player in the team needs to be replaced each year so that a national team has a conveyer belt of players ranging in age from 20 to 32.
I spoke briefly with Steve Rixon in Australia on his return home in late 2016 when he was Mickey Arthur's assistant, and the team was clogged up with Misbah and Younis as non-performing seniors, along with Imran Khan Sr and Sohail Khan who were clearly not fit to occupy their roles. Meanwhile Misbah was using Yasir Shah as if he was bowling on a Day 5 track in Abu Dhabi, with a crazy leg-side line and field.
Rixon was the consummate professional and said nothing indiscreet. But he made it clear that this was Misbah's team, not Arthur's and his own, and that things would change as soon as Misbah and Younis retired. I pressed him on that, and said "but Younis and Misbah show no sign of choosing to retire". Rixon replied "over here (Australia) you don't get to choose when you retire but in Pakistan you do, and we will just have to make the best of it".
That one conversation was a huge eye-opener for me.
The older leader, a white South African who had grown up under Apartheid, could see that teams require young blood and that senior players need to be forcibly retired to ensure that they don't fail together and exit together and destabilise the team. But Misbah - a younger and much more highly educated man - was entrenched in a culture of seniority. He did not recognize that his senior duo needed to be broken up and replaced one at a time, and he did not recognize that the senior players, himself included, were not performing. Most shockingly, this educated, highly intelligent man could not grasp the tactics and team composition required for Australian conditions.
You could argue - and I have - that Mickey Arthur did not adapt his Test team composition to include a second and third spinner in Asia. But then again, his South African team defeated Inzamam's Pakistan Test team in Pakistan a decade earlier by playing four quicks and 1 spinner.
When Misbah retired, we finally saw Mickey Arthur get the opportunity to put his own stamp on the Pakistan team.
Arthur's youthful Pakistan drew 1-1 in England in a Test series just as Misbah's had drawn 2-2. They lost 3-0 in South Africa just as Misbah's had lost 3-0 in Australia. And they lost two Test series in the UAE against Sri Lanka and New Zealand, although much of the reason was because of the unsettled batting line-up created by Misbah and Younis' late and simultaneous retirements.
Under Mickey Arthur was could see that the senior players - Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq, Sarfraz Ahmed and Yasir Shah - completely failed to step up when they become the oldest members of the team. They were outperformed in Tests outside Asia not just by Babar Azam but by Shaheen Shah Afridi, Shadab Khan and even Faheem Ashraf.
It's fairly obvious that Mickey Arthur would not have taken any of those four senior players to Australia next month. Suddenly, however, Misbah is back in charge and not only will Azhar, Shafiq and Yasir all play, we will also see Rahat Ali and possibly even Imran Khan Sr recalled.
The culture clash is extraordinary.
Mickey Arthur had given youth a chance, and in Tests outside Asia and in white ball cricket the youngsters propelled Pakistan forward. Tests in the UAE were a problem, but there were no decent spinners coming through and the batting was poor against spin. Pakistan missed a World Cup Semi-Final on Net Run Rate only, after beating both finalists plus South Africa.
Suddenly Pakistan has replaced him with a younger man, a man more familiar with emerging youth talent in Pakistan. And yet his first acts have been to recall veteran players, to appoint as Test Captain an elderly batsman who is in obvious decline, and to throw out some of the youngsters.
By the end of Pakistan's last Test under Mickey Arthur, in South Africa, the leader of the bowling attack was 18 years old, Yasir Shah had been dropped for the 20 year old Shadab Khan (who scored a 50 and took 4 wickets) and there was finally a fourth seamer in the team in the shape of Faheem Ashraf (who took 6-99 in that Test).
Yasir Shah was dropped, and everyone knew that Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq and Sarfraz Ahmed were on their absolute last chance, playing to retain any Test future. Azhar scored 0 and 15, Shafiq scored 0 and 65 while Sarfraz scored 50 and 0.
Three mentally-weak senior players, playing for their Test lives, leading from the back by all scoring a duck in what should have been their last ever Test.
You would think that the only possible conclusion was that the senior players were not good enough to be retained and needed to be replaced by younger talent.
And yet now Misbah is the Head Coach and Chief Selector rolled into one and those failing veterans are back leading the team.
Mickey Arthur wrote that senior players over 30 who were still performing needed to be replaced one at a time each year to protect the team from ever enduring a transition period. Obviously failing senior players simply were to be dropped as soon as their performances faltered.
And now we have come full circle. Even failing senior players are preferred, because they have "experience".
To quote Jose Mourinho, Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq (and Yasir Shah outside Asia) are specialists. Specialists in Failure.
But that experience in failure now seems to be a desired commodity.
It's not difficult to see why Mickey Arthur would hold his tongue. Firstly, at the age of 51 he still has two or three jobs left in cricket. Secondly, he knows the strengths and weaknesses of Misbah-ul-Haq intimately, and he must understand that if Misbah under-performs then Arthur's reputation will rise.
The two men are quite close in age, but are in many ways the opposite of the products that you would expect their environments to have created.
Mickey Arthur is a white South African man who is 51 years of age. He lived in the stifling conservatism of Apartheid South Africa until that system collapsed just after his 26th birthday. You would expect such a man to be an arch-conservative - even Graeme Smith, who is a generation younger, was widely mocked in Australia for his late declarations and cautious tactics.
But Mickey Arthur has never been what you would expect. His family moved to Durban, which is a city dominated economically by Indian South Africans and English-speaking South Africans, and where the ultra-conservative Afrikaaner culture is almost non-existent. In contrast with Johannesburg or Cape Town it is a city of year-round summer and it has its own distinctively English-speaking cricket culture, personified by the likes of England's Robin Smith and before that two of South Africa's three greatest cricketers - Barry Richards and Mike Procter.
It is Mickey Arthur's upbringing in the English-speaking subset of white South Africa which explains his complete lack of racial prejudice, his progressive attitude towards young players and his comfort living in an "Indian" culture.
Misbah-ul-Haq is in many ways the opposite. Socially he resembles many of the Pakistan cricketers who were household names in England in the 1970's. He shares the same family background as Imran Khan and Majid Khan and is not too dissimilar socially to Rameez Raja and Wasim Raja.
All four of those older men were university educated, but Imran and Majid Khan went to university in the UK (at Oxford, the most prestigious university) while Wasim Raja married an Englishwoman and settled in the UK.
All four of those earlier, highly educated Pakistan international cricketers were men who were cosmopolitan in their outlook and, by Pakistani standards, progressive in their outlook to both life and sport. You might expect Misbah-ul-Haq to have developed similarly but he clearly has not: here is a man who at the age of 45 sports a beard that he did not have when he reached the age of 40.
Misbah has in many ways "gone the other way". It is a fact of life that many people become increasingly cautious and conservative as they age. (As a psychiatrist, I would refer you to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzik's 2014 article in "Psychology Today" which summarized 92 separate research studies showing that as people age they take fewer risks and stick to what they are familiar with).
Misbah is probably cricket's ultimate example of advancing age creating a leader whose mind is generally closed to the introduction of youth, to the idea of constant gradual rejuvenation of a team, and who will always invest his confidence in an older player rather than back youth.
We saw all of this with Misbah's captaincy. Mickey Arthur wrote in his (earlier) book that he had had to sack Herschelle Gibbs and Shaun Pollock from the South African national team because no team can afford to lose several senior players at once and sink into a transition phase. The oldest player in the team needs to be replaced each year so that a national team has a conveyer belt of players ranging in age from 20 to 32.
I spoke briefly with Steve Rixon in Australia on his return home in late 2016 when he was Mickey Arthur's assistant, and the team was clogged up with Misbah and Younis as non-performing seniors, along with Imran Khan Sr and Sohail Khan who were clearly not fit to occupy their roles. Meanwhile Misbah was using Yasir Shah as if he was bowling on a Day 5 track in Abu Dhabi, with a crazy leg-side line and field.
Rixon was the consummate professional and said nothing indiscreet. But he made it clear that this was Misbah's team, not Arthur's and his own, and that things would change as soon as Misbah and Younis retired. I pressed him on that, and said "but Younis and Misbah show no sign of choosing to retire". Rixon replied "over here (Australia) you don't get to choose when you retire but in Pakistan you do, and we will just have to make the best of it".
That one conversation was a huge eye-opener for me.
The older leader, a white South African who had grown up under Apartheid, could see that teams require young blood and that senior players need to be forcibly retired to ensure that they don't fail together and exit together and destabilise the team. But Misbah - a younger and much more highly educated man - was entrenched in a culture of seniority. He did not recognize that his senior duo needed to be broken up and replaced one at a time, and he did not recognize that the senior players, himself included, were not performing. Most shockingly, this educated, highly intelligent man could not grasp the tactics and team composition required for Australian conditions.
You could argue - and I have - that Mickey Arthur did not adapt his Test team composition to include a second and third spinner in Asia. But then again, his South African team defeated Inzamam's Pakistan Test team in Pakistan a decade earlier by playing four quicks and 1 spinner.
When Misbah retired, we finally saw Mickey Arthur get the opportunity to put his own stamp on the Pakistan team.
Arthur's youthful Pakistan drew 1-1 in England in a Test series just as Misbah's had drawn 2-2. They lost 3-0 in South Africa just as Misbah's had lost 3-0 in Australia. And they lost two Test series in the UAE against Sri Lanka and New Zealand, although much of the reason was because of the unsettled batting line-up created by Misbah and Younis' late and simultaneous retirements.
Under Mickey Arthur was could see that the senior players - Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq, Sarfraz Ahmed and Yasir Shah - completely failed to step up when they become the oldest members of the team. They were outperformed in Tests outside Asia not just by Babar Azam but by Shaheen Shah Afridi, Shadab Khan and even Faheem Ashraf.
It's fairly obvious that Mickey Arthur would not have taken any of those four senior players to Australia next month. Suddenly, however, Misbah is back in charge and not only will Azhar, Shafiq and Yasir all play, we will also see Rahat Ali and possibly even Imran Khan Sr recalled.
The culture clash is extraordinary.
Mickey Arthur had given youth a chance, and in Tests outside Asia and in white ball cricket the youngsters propelled Pakistan forward. Tests in the UAE were a problem, but there were no decent spinners coming through and the batting was poor against spin. Pakistan missed a World Cup Semi-Final on Net Run Rate only, after beating both finalists plus South Africa.
Suddenly Pakistan has replaced him with a younger man, a man more familiar with emerging youth talent in Pakistan. And yet his first acts have been to recall veteran players, to appoint as Test Captain an elderly batsman who is in obvious decline, and to throw out some of the youngsters.
By the end of Pakistan's last Test under Mickey Arthur, in South Africa, the leader of the bowling attack was 18 years old, Yasir Shah had been dropped for the 20 year old Shadab Khan (who scored a 50 and took 4 wickets) and there was finally a fourth seamer in the team in the shape of Faheem Ashraf (who took 6-99 in that Test).
Yasir Shah was dropped, and everyone knew that Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq and Sarfraz Ahmed were on their absolute last chance, playing to retain any Test future. Azhar scored 0 and 15, Shafiq scored 0 and 65 while Sarfraz scored 50 and 0.
Three mentally-weak senior players, playing for their Test lives, leading from the back by all scoring a duck in what should have been their last ever Test.
You would think that the only possible conclusion was that the senior players were not good enough to be retained and needed to be replaced by younger talent.
And yet now Misbah is the Head Coach and Chief Selector rolled into one and those failing veterans are back leading the team.
Mickey Arthur wrote that senior players over 30 who were still performing needed to be replaced one at a time each year to protect the team from ever enduring a transition period. Obviously failing senior players simply were to be dropped as soon as their performances faltered.
And now we have come full circle. Even failing senior players are preferred, because they have "experience".
To quote Jose Mourinho, Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq (and Yasir Shah outside Asia) are specialists. Specialists in Failure.
But that experience in failure now seems to be a desired commodity.
