PakSword
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Yeah I was a fast bowler in my team.. My weight was 55 and height 5'11". Now I am over 85 kgs lolllMy hat’s off you Sir. You must have been a very athletic young man. I only played cricket & squash but was only mediocre at best in both the games; hence I took up swimming to keep myself fit.
Coming back to the real topic. Anyone who has played any sport at any level knows that winning & losing is part of the game. My problem is not with losing, it is how badly we lost!
There was a time when we also had decent athletes such as the sprinter Abdul Khaliq who won 36 international gold medals, 15 international silver medals, and 12 International bronze medals for Pakistan. He competed in the 100m, 200m, and 4 x 100 meters relay. Then there was 110-meter hurdler Ghulam Raziq a world-class athlete and won 2 golds and a silver in three Asiads (1958, 62 & 66). He also won gold at the Commonwealth Games (1962). We were also world Champions in hockey & squash for many years and our wrestlers were also among the world's best. Now only game left where Pakistanis are any good is Cricket.
With due respect, how come the team that won ICC ODI Champions trophy in London in 2017 and ranked as No.1 in the T20; stooped so low as to lose three 20/20 matches to a second-string Sri Lank cricket team? The only thing that happened was a complete change in Cricket management?
Pakistan has lost nearly test series in Australia but never this badly, a whitewash with two consecutive inning’s defeats! Admittedly you cannot train a donkey to win the Derby race. But when after the change of the jockey & the trainer, a winning horse comes last, who should be blamed except the jockey and the trainer?
Yes, Pakistan has limited talent, but the recent results show that even what little talent that is available, has performed worse than expected due to the gross incompetence of the management. Regret to say, you can't brush it off under the carpet by blaming it on the lack of talent; the Buck must stop at the coach & the selectors.
2017 champions trophy performance, in my honest opinion, was a fluke. And I don't consider T-20 as a valid format to gauge team's performance, hard work and talent. Shorten the format further and we will produce hitters who can win us 10 or 5 overs world cups.
There's no talent being polished in Pakistan for quite a long time, believe me. The names of legends you have mentioned in your comment, we can't have similar talent if we don't give our generation enough resources, and hold competitions from a very young school age..
If you see Pakistan's performance in snooker, you see some amazing performances and some trophies at international level. Nowadays, our youth is playing snooker, carem, ludo and cards at tea shops after 9 pm every evening. I remember we would wake up at 6 am at least 3 days a week to do net practice (because that is comparatively cooler time in all day). We used to have darker complexion on the exposed body parts such as face and arms because of too much exposure to sunlight. Sometime back I heard a teen telling his dad that he doesn't want to play cricket in the sun because his complexion would turn dark. In our time, we didn't have networked video games.. so got bored playing alone quickly. Nowadays young boys talk to each other during video game play so they don't need to socialize. Mobile phone has taken away a lot of time, and parents also don't stop children from wasting their time on these gadgets. Mafias have also contributed by taking away the few spaces/ grounds available, or turning them into garbage fields.
I visited Australia in 2014, I saw teenagers playing field hockey and football in the fields.. I saw youth playing too many other physical games (other than cricket). That's simply missing in Pakistan. Our youth is being destroyed and we can't do much to save it. We might see Pakistan cricket at the level of Zimbabwe in 10 years.