How do you rate Pakistan's record outside Asia before 2000 and after 2000?
I only started watching in the late 80s, so apart from looking at records, I can't say much based on my personal observation when it comes to 80s. I was also young to not grasp all aspects.
But I can say about 90s. They actually did very well when playing outside Pakistan. In fact, I used to tune up for Pakistani matches just to watch Wasim bowl. I don't think Pakistan had good batting to do consistently well when playing away, but they produced good cricket based on the gun bowling unit. One thing that surprised me was their home performance at times. I am not sure what was going, to be honest.
I think the team underachieved. They should have done better with the players they had at that time. Still, it was a good team playing away and you can hope to watch quality bowling in pretty much every series from Pakistan.
Things started changing in 2000s. Wasim and Waqar were done by then. Akhtar was very skillful. People talk a lot about his pace, but he had skills as well. The problem was him not even playing 50 tests despite having such a long career. Then Asif showed some brilliance, but we know the story. I did not rate Amir that high from start.
Pakistan batting may have been actually slightly better after the 2000s. Not looking at stats, just going by thinking about various players and their contributions. But bowling was far superior in the 90s. Waqar was not the same after the mid-90s, but still a good bowler. Saqlain was a gun spinner.
The difference of 90s vs 2000s can be summed up by Pakistani consistently being in the top 4 vs consistently being outside of the top 4. I don't mean what happened for 1-2 years, but over a long period, there will be no hesitation to say that Pakistan was the top team in the 90s. The same can't be said about periods after the 2000s. Yes, Pakitan did well from time to time, but the decline was obvious due to the bowling unit being far inferior.
Now the current situation is probably worse than it should be. Pakistan is still a large country with cricket being the top sport. Domestic cricket should be used to groom players and before branding anyone talented, those young players should be playing a few seasons and do well in domestics. I saw some thread about one Paksitani player getting in the squad who has not even played first-class cricket, but some stats were used and those stats were probably from some club cricket or something similar. Once in a while, you can get lucky with that approach, but overall it's a poor way to pick players. I am not saying that selection will solve everything, but that's an easy thing to do and low-hanging fruits. Doing such basic things wrong and then talking about big bang reforms seems non-sense to me.
Too long a reply here, but there is no comparison from the 90s to the current team. Overall, it has been a gradual decline from the 90s.
