Cricket News

‘We have to make player’s ready in age group cricket’- Pakistan cricketer talks about flaws in domestic cricket system

Najam Sethi was made the chairman of the PCB recently.

Jan 27, 2023 6:23 pm

The Najam Sethi regime has made an interesting change in Pakistan cricket’s domestic structure. The departmental sides were the fulcrum of the Pakistan cricketing setup. They were filtered out from the domestic setup. As a result, the number of teams were reduced to 6 from 16 in 2019. Now the Sethi-led regime has decided to go back to the old format.

Kamran Akmal expressed strong views about the subject. He said Pakistan are struggling to form a proper team because of a lack of bench strength in the cricket ecosystem. “(On whether Pakistan too can form 2 teams) Pehele aap ek to bana lein thik se (First at least make one team properly). Before 2018-19, you could have made three teams due to the number of teams that were playing domestic and regional cricket.”

Departmental teams are the way to go in domestic cricket for Pakistan – Kamran Akmal

Akmal said that Pakistan cricket reaped rewards based on the earlier domestic structure. He believed that the departmental cricket system played an important part in churning out talent that was available in Pakistan which made the Men in Green a champion side. Pakistan have relied on this system for years which has given them great fast bowlers which have made the country proud.

To elaborate on this he said, “Departmental teams have given Pakistan so many great players, but we stopped that and have just six domestic teams. If this experiment had been correct, then Fawad Alam wouldn’t have had to wait 11 years to make a comeback. We are finding it difficult to form one proper team.” He took the example of India and said that age group cricket in the neighbouring country is so strong, and the youngsters are ready to play international cricket when called upon.

“I talk about India because if you see the top four players who have scored most hundreds in the past 10-12 years, three of them are from India. “So they play long cricket and that’s what should be our focus too. We will need to mentally prepare our players and make them stronger and this should now happen from age-group cricket.”