Pakistan cricket is in one of its stormier cycles again, and this time the turbulence has spilled straight from the dressing room to the boardroom.
A bruising tour of England, where Pakistan folded meekly in a heavy defeat, forced the Pakistan Cricket Board into drastic action. Seven players were ordered home midway through the trip. Senior figures on the support staff were cleared out as well, among them former captain Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul. It was not a tweak. It was a reset.
In the middle of the noise stands PCB chairman Mohsin Naqvi, trying to steady a ship that has been taking on water for weeks.
Naqvi hits back: “Has cricket ended there as well?”
Naqvi has not tried to pretend this is a smooth patch. He openly accepted that Pakistan cricket is going through a “difficult phase,” but he pushed back hard at the idea that the sky is falling.
To make his point, he reached beyond Pakistan’s borders.
“Let me ask you one thing: South Africa lost to Namibia, and India lost to Ireland. Has cricket ended there as well?” Naqvi said in a video now circulating widely on social media.
For him, the message is simple: shocks happen, even to giants. The response, he insisted, has to be ruthless selection, not panic.
“Yes, one thing is important: whoever we need here, we will definitely bring in. If someone is not clicking or not performing, then what can we do? Every match and every series is important for us.”
The England tour, in that sense, became a line in the sand. Underperformers were sent home, reputations put to one side. The clear-out of Sarfaraz and Gul underlined that nobody, not even former captains and World Cup winners, is beyond scrutiny.
Agha Salman in the spotlight
Within that wider shake-up, Naqvi also moved to clarify the situation around Salman Agha, a player Pakistan have long viewed as a key middle-order option but who has struggled badly for rhythm in recent outings.
“Agha is such a brilliant player, and yet he is not clicking at the moment for certain reasons,” Naqvi said.
He stressed that the decision-making around Agha was not punitive.
“We are not telling him, ‘We asked you to go and rest’; we spoke to him and did everything. So, the objective is not to remove someone from the team. The objective is that if a player is not clicking, then we should make a change.”
The line is a window into Naqvi’s current approach: loyalty, yes, but only up to the point where performance allows it. Once form deserts a player, sentiment gives way to selection.
“Look at what the rankings were before”
The fiercest criticism, though, has been aimed directly at Naqvi’s tenure. Two Test defeats have triggered familiar accusations that Pakistan cricket has “been destroyed” under the current regime.
Naqvi rejected that narrative and turned to the numbers that he believes back him.
“Those who say cricket has been destroyed since I came – look at what the rankings were before we brought our coaching team,” he said. “We were eighth in ODIs and now we're fifth, in T20Is we jumped to sixth position from ninth.”
For Naqvi, the red-ball failures sting, but they do not define the broader picture.
“Yes, absolutely, what happened in the Test match cannot be termed wrong. We have lost these two matches, but I believe that, God willing, we will make progress in the coming days, just as we did in ODIs and T20Is. I have never been afraid of criticism, and I never will be.”
The message is defiant: judge the project by its trajectory, not just by its latest collapse.
The question now is whether those ranking climbs in the white-ball formats will buy him enough time and trust to repair a Test side that has just been ripped apart mid-tour.
