This Is High Time We Question the presence of Elephant in the room
Who benefits when Pakistan cricket continues to underperform?
I am not suggesting that someone is deliberately making Pakistan lose. That is a serious claim and it requires evidence.
What I am questioning is the system of incentives, decisions and accountability surrounding Pakistan cricket.
Because whenever meritocracy is compromised, the consequences eventually appear on the field.
And then we hear the same explanation:
"Pakistan doesn't have enough talent."
I don't buy that argument so easily.
Talent does not simply disappear.
Talent does not grow like mushrooms after rain either.
It has to be identified, developed, tested, measured and continuously improved.
If Pakistan genuinely lacks talent in a particular area, then the next question should be:
What are we doing to create that talent?
That is where the discussion becomes uncomfortable.
Stop Saying There Is No Talent
A serious cricketing system cannot depend on the assumption that talent will somehow walk through the door by itself.
You need proper scouting.
You need structured domestic cricket.
You need age-group development.
You need high-performance programmes.
You need sports science.
You need data analysis.
You need opposition research.
You need fitness monitoring.
You need coaches who understand modern cricket.
And, above everything else, you need a mechanism that rewards performance and potential rather than connections, reputation or convenience.
This is where I believe Pakistan needs serious investment in research and development—not just infrastructure.
R&D in sport is not some corporate buzzword.
It means asking questions.
Why is a particular player declining?
Why does a particular bowling action break down?
Why does a batter struggle against a specific type of bowling?
Why does a promising player perform domestically but fail internationally?
Which training method produces better results?
Which talent-identification model actually works?
These questions require investigation.
They require people who are willing to go beyond the obvious.
Coverage Is Not the Same as Intelligence
This is where technology enters the discussion.
We now have access to enormous amounts of cricket footage, performance data, analytics and artificial intelligence.
But having access to information does not automatically mean that an organization knows how to use it.
There is a growing tendency to treat AI as nothing more than a chatbot.
That is a serious misunderstanding.
AI can assist with pattern recognition, performance analysis, opposition scouting, workload monitoring, video analysis and countless other areas.
But AI does not eliminate the need for human interrogation.
In fact, it increases it.
The machine can identify a pattern.
A competent human still has to ask:
Why is this pattern occurring?
And then:
What should we do about it?
That distinction matters enormously in Pakistan, where technological adoption can sometimes become an excuse for avoiding actual fieldwork.
"We don't need to go to the grounds. We have coverage."
No.
Coverage is not scouting.
A database is not development.
A video library is not coaching.
An AI-generated observation is not a substitute for human judgment.
Technology should make human investigation better—not make organizations lazy.
The Real Problem: A Mindset of Avoidance
There is a phrase in Urdu that perfectly describes this attitude:
کام سے جان چھڑانا
Finding a way to escape the work.
And that is precisely what worries me.
If an organization can explain a failure without investigating it, it will eventually become comfortable with failure.
If a player can be blamed without examining the development system behind him, the system remains untouched.
If a captain can be blamed after every defeat, nobody has to examine how the squad was built.
If the coach can be replaced every few months, nobody has to answer whether the coaching structure itself is functional.
If the selectors can be changed, nobody has to examine whether the selection criteria were ever properly defined.
That is how accountability gets diluted.
Everyone has an explanation.
Nobody has responsibility.
The Law of Consequences
Every decision produces consequences.
If you compromise meritocracy, you eventually compromise performance.
If you ignore talent development, your talent pool eventually becomes weaker.
If you neglect research, your competitors eventually understand the game better than you do.
If you repeatedly replace systems instead of improving them, you lose institutional memory.
And if you keep protecting the process from criticism, you eventually protect failure itself.
Today's dismal performance should therefore not be treated as an isolated cricket match.
It should be treated as another data point.
Another signal.
Another opportunity to ask whether the system is actually learning.
Because losing a match is normal in sport.
Failing to learn from repeated losses is not.
So, Who Is Actually Benefiting?
This is the question I want to leave with the reader.
Who benefits when Pakistan cricket remains trapped in the same cycle?
Who benefits from endless debates about individual players while structural questions remain unanswered?
Who benefits when every defeat becomes another media cycle instead of a serious post-mortem?
Who benefits when attention remains focused on personalities rather than processes?
I am not claiming that there is a hidden group deliberately engineering Pakistan cricket's decline.
I am saying something simpler:
A system can produce beneficiaries without anyone explicitly designing the system for them.
Commercial attention benefits from controversy.
Media engagement benefits from debate.
Social media benefits from outrage.
Personal brands benefit from constant discussion.
And administrators can sometimes survive longer when accountability remains fragmented.
Meanwhile, the actual cricket suffers.
That is why we need to stop asking only who lost the match.
We need to ask:
Who designed the system that produced the result?
The Final Question
Pakistan does not need another emotional reaction.
It needs a proper cricketing ecosystem.
It needs meritocracy.
It needs investment in talent.
It needs serious R&D.
It needs human investigation alongside technology.
It needs continuity.
It needs institutional memory.
And most importantly, it needs accountability without scapegoating.
Because blaming one player after every defeat is easy.
Replacing one captain is easy.
Changing one coach is easy.
Issuing another statement is easy.
Fixing the system is difficult.
And perhaps that is exactly why we keep avoiding it.
The problem is not necessarily that Pakistan has no talent.
The bigger problem may be that we have never built a sufficiently reliable mechanism to identify, develop, protect and deploy that talent.
Until we confront that reality, every new defeat will produce another excuse, another argument, another narrative—and eventually, another defeat.
So before we ask:
"Who should be dropped?"
Perhaps we should ask the more important question:
"What exactly are we doing to make sure the next generation is better than the current one?"
Because if the answer is still "not enough," then the scoreboard is not the problem.
The system is.