Pakistan Cricket Faces Overhaul After England Defeats
Pakistan cricket is not just losing a Test series in England. It is being torn up and rewritten in real time.
Two brutal defeats – an innings and 103 runs at Headingley, then a 194-run beating at Lord’s – have given England an unassailable 2-0 lead. For Pakistan, the scoreline is only the surface damage. Underneath, the Pakistan Cricket Board has already started ripping out the old wiring.
PCB swings the axe
Sarfaraz Ahmed and Umar Gul are out of the coaching setup. Mike Hesson has been brought in to take charge, with former Australia seamer Ashley Noffke installed as his assistant. It is a bold move to make mid-tour, and an even bolder one to pair it with a clearout of the dressing room.
Seven players have been removed from the squad for the third Test. Among them: Mohammad Rizwan, Imam-ul-Haq and Salman Ali Agha – experienced names, not fringe hopefuls. The message is unmistakable. The PCB has stopped treating this as a salvage mission and started treating it as a reset.
The board, it seems, has decided to look past Edgbaston and towards a different future.
Shoaib Akhtar lifts the lid
Shoaib Akhtar has seen enough Pakistan teams unravel to recognise a breaking point when it arrives. Speaking on the OutSide EDGE show, the former fast bowler laid bare what he believes is driving the upheaval.
“The PCB itself was very disappointed by these people, and they don’t expect anything from this Pakistan squad. The plan is to remove this squad and replace them with younger and newer blood. Players who just want to play for Pakistan. They are looking at the future now, and they are working at it in the right way,” he said.
This is not, in his view, a knee-jerk reaction to two bad Tests. It is an acceleration of a rebuild the board had already decided was inevitable. England’s dominance has simply stripped away any remaining patience.
Akhtar, though, sounded a clear warning: you can change a squad, but you cannot afford to burn through your rarest assets.
Protecting the pace jewels
Pakistan’s pace production line has long been its pride. Even in this bleak moment, Akhtar sees three bowlers whose careers must be ring-fenced.
“In this transition, I just want Shaheen Shah Afridi, Naseem Shah and Haris Rauf’s careers to be saved. These guys have a lot of cricket left in them,” he said.
Those names are more than just fast bowlers; they are the spine of any future Pakistan attack. Over-bowling them, mishandling injuries, or throwing them into constant chaos during a structural overhaul could inflict damage that no selection reset can fix.
As the PCB turns towards youth, Akhtar’s plea is simple: rebuild around them, not over them.
‘Nothing’ expected from this squad
If there was any doubt about how deeply the board’s faith has eroded, Akhtar’s account of a recent conversation with a PCB official strips it away.
He says he asked what the PCB expected from this team on the England tour. The reply, as he tells it, was brutally direct.
“Nothing. We have expectations from the next generation of players that we are preparing for the big stage,” Akhtar quoted the official as saying.
The same official, he added, described Pakistan cricket as being “on a ventilator” and suggested it could take around two years to revive the national setup. That kind of language is rare from within the establishment. It points to a belief that this is not a form slump, but a system failure.
The scale of the task is stark: a proud Test side unable to land a punch in two matches, a board already writing off the present and investing its emotional energy in players who are not yet in the XI.
‘We didn’t have the fight in us’
Akhtar’s criticism did not stop at boardroom strategy. He turned to the field, to the way Pakistan folded in Leeds and London, and found something even more troubling than technical flaws.
Reflecting on the defeats, he stripped his assessment down to one line: “We didn’t have the fight in us.”
For a country that built its cricketing mythology on defiance and unpredictability, that is a damning verdict. The issue, in Akhtar’s eyes, is not just skill. It is resistance. It is the willingness to contest every session, even when conditions, momentum and history lean the other way.
That absence of fight makes the PCB’s drastic measures easier to understand, even if they remain ruthless.
Work at home, turmoil abroad
While the senior team struggles in England, Akhtar saw a very different scene back in Lahore. He visited the National Cricket Academy during the second Test and was struck by the scale of the work being done there.
“After 26 years, there is work being done at the academy now,” he said.
New structures, renewed investment, a long-overdue upgrade of the country’s main development hub – all of it suggests the board is trying to rebuild from the base up, not just reshuffle the top. For Akhtar, none of this – not the turmoil, not the changes – came as a shock.
When asked if the chaos surprised him, his response was cutting: “What is the shock there? Didn’t you expect that?”
In his mind, the warning signs have been visible for years. The England tour has simply forced everyone else to look.
Edgbaston and beyond
Pakistan now head to Edgbaston for the third Test, staring at the prospect of a 3-0 whitewash. On paper, they still have a match to save, pride to reclaim, questions to answer.
Yet the decisions already taken by the PCB make one thing clear: this series has become a backdrop. The real drama is off the field, in selection meetings, academy plans and long-term blueprints.
England will chase a clean sweep in Birmingham. Pakistan, in truth, are chasing something far more elusive: a way to breathe life back into a team their own officials describe as being on a ventilator.
The scoreboard in this final Test will tell one story. The next two years of Pakistan cricket will tell the one that really matters.
