“PAKISTAN CRICKET
There are reports now, rising, not quite yet deafening, but steady that Salman Ali Agha is to be handed the keys to Pakistan cricket across formats. Captain in all three.
The tone of this speculation carries certainty, as if it’s already been written in the margins somewhere in Gaddafi Stadium’s corridors. And perhaps it has.
It is not a leap of faith entirely.
Salman brings with him not just a cricketing intellect, the kind that thinks on its feet and evolves with the flow of a match but also a presence. A quiet assertion. The kind of presence that doesn’t shout leadership but carries it in the way it stands still while others shift around it. That is no small thing in Pakistan cricket, where captains are not chosen but survived.
Yet, let’s not rush to romanticise. Salman, for all his qualities, was never shaped in the kiln of T20 cricket. He was not meant for its chaos. But cricket has a way of making its own demands, and players, especially in Pakistan find ways to answer.
Salman has adapted, grown, morphed into something more multidimensional. It’s credit to his hunger. His captaincy, though, will find truer tests ahead in conditions not just foreign, but hostile; against teams not just stronger, but ruthless.
In Tests, Shan Masood’s brief tenure felt like a misstep waiting to be corrected. His captaincy record abysmal, his personal form not entirely lost, in fact, he sits second on the Test averages this year.
But there’s a sense that the project lacked clarity. Shan never quite looked like he believed the job was his. Salman, by contrast, feels like the succession plan the board didn’t know it had.
But what of the ODIs? What of Mohammad Rizwan? Here is a man who has not just held the line, but, in a sense, dignified it. As captain, as batsman, he has been more than serviceable.
There’s a quiet intelligence to his batting, a resilience that belies his limitations. Why unseat him? What crime has he committed? That he doesn’t fit the future the selectors now dream of?
Perhaps this is the cost of Pakistan’s pivot, a belated and an unnecessary dependent on someone who complies, & exterminate who ask questions.
Babar and Rizwan, so central for so long, now find themselves cast aside in T20s, relics of a style that once worked but no longer flies. The world has moved on. Pakistan is trying to catch up. Fair enough. Justified.
But why overload Salman? Why risk fraying him by spreading him thin? Let him shape the red-ball team, the format where real leaders are sculpted — and take charge of the new T20 vision.
But in ODIs, surely, a more thoughtful debate is warranted. One format too many can blur even the clearest minds.
Salman may well be the future. But futures need not be forced all at once. Let him grow into it, rather than be thrown into it.”
Who do you think wrote this drivel?
