Aatif Nawaz Critiques PCB's Meltdown After Lord's
Aatif Nawaz tears into PCB’s ‘meltdown’ after Lord’s: ‘What’s the bowling coach done?’
Pakistan cricket has seen plenty of upheaval. This one still managed to shock.
Days after a 2-0 series defeat in England was sealed at Lord’s, the Pakistan Cricket Board detonated what looked less like a reset and more like a clear-out. Seven players sent home mid-tour. Head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed removed. Bowling coach Umar Gul gone as well. Five uncapped players summoned for a dead-rubber third Test at Edgbaston.
On the For The Love Of Cricket podcast, British-Pakistani broadcaster Aatif Nawaz looked at the wreckage and asked the question that cut through the noise: why the bowling coach?
‘His bowlers took all the wickets’
Nawaz, appearing alongside Stuart Broad and Jos Buttler, accepted that Pakistan’s batting had collapsed beyond excuse. Across four innings in the series, Pakistan never reached 200. That, he said, was indefensible.
But the scale and direction of the PCB’s response left him baffled.
“Get rid of your head coach, get rid of your bowling coach. What’s the bowling coach done? His bowlers took enough. They took all the wickets,” Nawaz said. “At least the bowlers at Lord’s got the wickets. It just seemed like the kind of move you do when you’re trying to placate the angry voices in your country.”
The numbers back him up. At Lord’s, Mohammad Abbas took nine wickets and earned a coveted place on the honours board. Pakistan’s attack, for all the pressure they were under, kept dragging the side back into the contest. The runs never came. The bowlers still paid the price.
That, in Nawaz’s eyes, turned a selection cull into something more dangerous: a panic response dressed up as policy.
Chaos as a constant
Nawaz placed this latest upheaval inside a familiar Pakistani storyline – churn as a way of life.
“It’s very hard to keep track of who’s the batting coach, who’s the bowling coach, who’s your chief selector, who’s your captain, who’s your vice captain,” he said. The instability runs so deep that roles feel temporary, even from game to game.
“He could be captain one game and then the 12th man the next, as Salman Agha found out in this test series.”
That line summed up the absurdity. One week you’re central to the project; the next you’re carrying drinks. Players are left guessing where they stand, or if they stand anywhere at all.
Nawaz did acknowledge there is at least a thin defence for change before a dead rubber. With the series already gone and England rampant, there is an argument for ripping up the XI and trying something radical.
“It’s a dead rubber. You could say if you play the same 11, they would be bound to get dominated by England again. So you have to try something drastically different. That’s the defence of the move, I suppose,” he said.
But for him, that still doesn’t explain why the one functioning department – the bowling unit – saw its coach sacrificed.
The message to the next generation
Nawaz’s sharpest concern wasn’t about Edgbaston at all. It was about the future of Pakistan’s red-ball cricket.
“What kind of message are you sending to the next generation of Pakistan cricket players who want to play red-ball cricket for Pakistan? Why would they want to do that?” he asked.
It’s a question that hangs over the entire episode. Test cricket already sits in the shadow of the white-ball game, financially and in terms of career security. Pakistan, like many countries, is losing players to the global franchise circuit. Those leagues offer money, stability, and clear contracts. Test cricket, as this week showed, can offer none of that.
Nawaz fears that if young cricketers see seven players and two coaches discarded in a single announcement after one bad week, they will draw the obvious conclusion: red-ball cricket for Pakistan is a gamble not worth taking. White-ball and T20 cricket, with their global leagues and predictable paydays, will look safer, smarter, easier to control.
That is the long-term damage he sees in what others might write off as just another Pakistan reshuffle.
Anger over analysis
Strip the story back and one detail refuses to move: the bowling.
At Lord’s, Abbas’s nine wickets and Pakistan’s collective effort with the ball showed a unit doing its job. They created chances, they finished them, they gave their side a foothold. Yet the man overseeing that group, Umar Gul, lost his position in the same sweep that removed the head coach and half a squad.
Whatever the justification, it sends a stark signal. Perform, don’t perform – you might still go.
For Nawaz, that’s the heart of the problem. This wasn’t a targeted response to a specific failing. It looked like a board trying to cool public fury by throwing out as many names as possible.
The batting will rightly come under the microscope. The structural issues behind Pakistan’s red-ball decline will be debated again. But the sacking of a bowling coach whose attack “took all the wickets” lingers as the emblem of a decision driven by noise rather than nuance.
If that becomes the norm, the real question isn’t who plays the next Test at Edgbaston. It’s who will still be willing to play the next generation of Tests for Pakistan at all.
