Blanked at home

Pakistan cricket is stooping to new lows with passing time. A 0-2 whitewash handed down by Bangladesh in the Test series culminating yesterday is Pakistan's only second such humiliation in a home Test rubber. Before that, Team Pakistan was blanked at home by England in a three-match Test series in 2022. With the loss in both Test matches, played in Rawalpindi as part of the World Test Championship, our team has completed ten matches at home without a victory. Among the Test-playing nations, only Zimbabwe and Bangladesh have a longer winless run on home turf. Also, Team Pakistan has now lost a Test series at home to each of the ten oldest full ICC member teams, becoming only the second side – after Bangladesh – to earn such disrepute.

Words literally fail to measure up the embarrassment that Team Pakistan suffered at the hands of a much junior Bangladesh – and that too on the home soil. The margin of Bangladesh's victory – 10 wickets in the first Test and 6 wickets in the second one – is enough to convey the ease with which the visitors completed the historic task. That the Pakistan think-tank, including skipper Shan Masood, had no plan and no strategy is pretty evident. The two defeats – having pushed Pakistan down to the eighth place in the Test ranking with a mere 19.05 victory percentage as against 68.52 per cent of the top-ranked India – has dealt a serious blow to Pakistan's chances of reaching the World Test Championship 2023-25 final.

It's nothing short of an enigma that a team that enjoys the services of an outstanding talent in both batting and bowling has been struggling in all formats of the game. The cricket czars of Pakistan perhaps need to think out of the box to avoid a hockey-like fall of our cricket.