- Lack of county exposure:
The core skills of our cricketers in the 70s, 80s and 90s were built in County cricket. Nearly every Pakistan great of that period spent years in English system and that made them twice or thrice the cricketers they would have been otherwise.
- Decline in the severity of ball-tampering:
Ball-tampering still happens today, and more often than what people think. Teams are very subtle these days and they only get caught when they go overboard.
However, back in the day when Pakistan built its reputation as the land of fast bowlers, the level of tampering that we pulled off, starting with the introduction of the “art” by Sarfraz Nawaz, is something that is not possible today.
Those custom made ball scratched with bottle caps made half the careers of our fearsome fast bowlers. The likes of Wasim and Imran were very good with the new, untouched ball as well, but someone like Waqar would be just an ordinary bowler without those tampered balls.
Waqar’s bowling action and rhythm was perfect for those tampered balls. It was a match made in heaven. He took over a decade to learn to bowl with a proper, untouched bowl and even then he was inferior to other fast bowlers of his time.
His peak from 1989 to 1994 was mainly due to ball-tampering.
We all badh Naseem, Shaheen, Junaid, Shinwari, Rahat Ali etc. but all of them will have much better figures and more 5 wicket hauls if they were bowling with the type of balls Waqar Younis was bowling in his youth.
- lack of proper batting culture:
Pakistan always took pride in its misplaced glory as a fast bowling nation. The systematic cheating of reverse-swing was mistaken for extreme natural talent.
That lie formed the foundation of our cricket ideology and that is why we never became a consistent team because our batting was never A class.
We never focused on building a proper unit and as soon as the 1 neutral umpire rule was introduced in Test cricket in 1994, our batsmen started to get LBW more often at home and we started to lose home series frequently.
Although, McGrath will disagree with this because he had Inzamam plumb LBW 3 times in 3 balls in Peshawar in 1998, but Nazir Jr. couldn’t raise his finger and even Inzamam couldn’t believe it. That prompted ICC to go a step further and introduce 2 neutral umpires from 2002 onwards.
We kept salivating over Wasim, Waqar and Shoaib and Mohammad Zahid for a brief period, but no one bothered about why an axe man like Ijaz, who couldn’t play spin to save his life, was batting at 3 for an Asian Test side.
You don’t put runs on the board consistently and you will lose a series no matter what heroics your bowlers perform every now and then.
- Celebration of inconsistency and hoping for miracles:
Pakistan is the only sporting team in the world that takes pride in inconsistency and romanticizes it as unpredictability. That is attitude is present in not only the players, coaches, media but also the fans.
The 1992 World Cup also destroyed Pakistan cricket culture and ensured that professionalism will become an alien concept. It made the nation believe in miracles and cornered tiger mentality. We never understood that success is a process and you have to build towards it.
Before every World Cup, our players wear white shalwar kameez and visit Imran to listen of his cornered tiger speech, something that you won’t find in other teams.
I don’t see Australia going to Ponting, Waugh, Clarke and India going to Kapil and West Indies going to Lloyd. In the future, you won’t see English teams going to Morgan for “blessings” before boarding the plane for World Cup.
- external constraints:
There are other factors beyond PCB control that have caused a lot of damage as well. Pakistan is a weak economy struggling on handouts and loans and has a very poor global reputation. To the outside world, we are hardly any different to Afghanistan or war torn Middle East countries like Iraq, Syria, Yemen or some remote destitute African countries.
In many ways, the success of a sporting body greatly reflects the status of the country. When the country is on ventilator, not much can be expected from it’s sporting bodies.
On the other hand, India didn’t allow 1983 to define its cricket culture. That World Cup win was a bigger miracle and a bigger cornered tigers moment than what Pakistan did 9 years later, but India knew that it was not a recipe for success.
They also focused on building a batting culture and that allowed them to maintain their batting standards and also raise their bowling level, while Pakistan went south on both fronts because Pakistan’s bowling legacy was built on systematic cheating.
Moreover, India’s global reputation in spite of the recent damage is at a completely different level to Pakistan, and so is their economic potential.
India is a much bigger and more prosperous country than Pakistan so they always had way more potential for cricket success, and it was only a matter of them getting their act together. Still, the gap widened very abruptly because Pakistan could not sustain its level.
