AS head coach of national cricket team Saqlain Mushtaq’s tenure is set to expire in February, Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) these days is searching for a new coach and the focus is on hiring a foreign one.
The search for a new head coach suffered fresh setbacks on Saturday when Australia’s Tom Moody and Zimbabwe’s Andy Flower both ruled themselves out of the running because of their commitments with the franchise cricket.
Before that attempts to bring back Champions Trophy winning coach Mickey Arthur also failed.
Our country has produced many talented cricketers which have also been hired as coaches by other cricket playing nations.
We have a pool of good minds that have proved their prowess as a coach in the past. The very stint of Saqlain Mushtaq is also before us.
Though the last two series against England and New Zealand have not been as good but before that the Greenshirts really performed well in both the T-Twenty world cups.
During the tenure of Mohsin Khan, our team demonstrated immense improvement. Hence, instead of focusing only on hiring a foreign coach, the PCB should also look into the domestic resources available.
In our view, the local coach will be more appropriate for our team as he will have far better understanding of the team members and he can far easily communicate with them unlike the foreign coaches.
Then as was done in the last two T-Twenty world cups, we may hire foreign consultants both for batting and bowling on a temporary basis for special tournaments.
Given the poor performance of national team in the two domestic series, the PCB also needs to do some retrospection.
Time has come to take some important decisions vis-à-vis split captaincy and the separate team for the limited overs and the test matches.
All the three formats require a completely different frame of mindset and we have to choose the captain and the team members keeping in view their suitability for them.
