Bronze with backbone: Fatima’s Pakistan find resilience

 

Bronze with backbone: Fatima’s Pakistan find resilience, but must raise their ceiling

By Asher Butt

Pakistan women returned from the Asian Games cricket competition with a bronze medal, and the color of the medal should not obscure the character behind it. In a tournament marked by rain, batting collapses, a heavy semi-final defeat, and a demanding schedule, Fatima Sana’s side showed enough courage to secure a podium finish. Yet the campaign also revealed the gap Pakistan must close to consistently challenge Asia’s strongest teams.

The bronze-medal victory over Bangladesh was Pakistan at their best and most imperfect: vulnerable in the middle overs, but resilient under pressure. Captain Fatima Sana’s unbeaten 45 from 30 balls and Umm-e-Hani’s outstanding 3 for 10 drove Pakistan to a 31-run victory after posting 145 for eight and restricting Bangladesh to 114 for seven.

Earlier, it was Sana Mir, the former captain who led Pakistan to Asian Games back-to-back gold in 2010 in Guangzhou and 2014 in Incheon.

 

A medal earned the hard way

Pakistan’s route to bronze was far from straightforward. The campaign began with a rain-reduced 11-over quarter-final against Thailand, where a chase of 92 proved surprisingly tense. Thailand posted 91 for four, led by Nannapat Koncharoenkai’s 49. Fatima led from the front with 2 for 22, including the final-over dismissal of Koncharoenkai.

Pakistan’s reply started brightly through Shawaal Zulfiqar and Gull Feroza, adding 36 in 3.5 overs. However, familiar middle-order fragility surfaced as they slipped to 47 for four. Promoted to No. 4, Fatima swung the momentum back with a quickfire 21 from 13 balls. Late strikes from Tuba Hassan, calm finishing from Umm-e-Hani, and Eman Naseer carried Pakistan home to 92 for seven with two balls remaining—an early warning of batting instability.

 

Semi-final exposes the gap

The semi-final against Sri Lanka was the campaign’s clearest illustration of both promise and limitation. Batting first, Pakistan produced their most complete innings, reaching 177 for four.

Ayesha Zafar delivered high-class T20 batting, smashing 71 off 40 balls with nine fours and two sixes. Her 50 came off just 27 deliveries—the joint third-fastest for Pakistan in women's T20Is. Supported by Shawaal Zulfiqar’s 54 off 50, their 115-run stand marked Pakistan's highest third-wicket partnership in the format. Fatima added an unbeaten 20 to set a formidable target.

Key Performers vs Sri Lanka came from Ayesha Zafar 71 (40 balls) — 9x4, 2x6, Shawaal Zulfiqar 54 (50 balls), Fatima Sana 20* (12 balls), 3rd Wicket Partnership 115 runs (Highest for Pakistan in WT20Is)

However, 177 was not enough against Chamari Athapaththu, whose unbeaten 83 off 50 balls guided Sri Lanka to an eight-wicket win with 13 balls to spare. Pakistan’s bowling attack failed to maintain pressure across consecutive overs, revealing a critical gap in execution against top-tier chasing sides.

 

Fatima Sana’s leadership statement

The bronze-medal match became Fatima’s defining day. Pakistan again stumbled after a promising start, collapsing to 67 for five in the 12th over. Fatima altered the match's emotional direction with an unbeaten 45 from 30 balls, featuring three sixes and three fours. Partnering with Aliya Riaz (25 off 22), the duo added 67 for the sixth wicket, converting a shaky total into a competitive 145 for eight.

Fatima’s all-round contribution—vital runs, timely wickets, and tactical composure—solidified her role as the team's anchor. Yet, heavy reliance on a single leader remains a vulnerability that requires urgent support from the broader unit.

 

Umm-e-Hani’s match-winning control

If Fatima supplied the momentum, Umm-e-Hani delivered the control. Her figures of 3 for 10 from four overs throttled Bangladesh’s chase, removing top- and middle-order batters through disciplined pace variations.

Sharmin Akhter resisted with an unbeaten 46, but with Hani choking the scoring rate and support bowlers taking a wicket each, Bangladesh fell well short.

 

Areas for growth for the team green

Pakistan’s campaign highlighted clear strengths alongside crucial areas for improvement:

• Leadership & Individual Brilliance: Fatima Sana’s all-round influence and Ayesha Zafar’s top-order power showed high ceiling potential.
• Spin Control: Umm-e-Hani demonstrated the value of disciplined spin in big-match conditions.
• Bouncing Back: Recovering after the semi-final heartbreak to claim bronze—Pakistan’s third Asian Games women's cricket medal—showed mental fortitude.

 

Critical areas for improvement

1. Middle-Order Stability: Preventing collapse when early wickets fall to avoid over-relying on lower-order heroics.
2. Death-Bowling Execution: Developing sharper yorkers, slower balls, and defensive field placements against elite batters.
3. Fielding Precision: Raising standards to limit errors that elite teams routinely exploit.
4. Squad Depth: Building secondary match-winners who can independently turn tight games.

Bronze is a deserved foundation, but the next stage of development requires turning occasional resilience into repeatable consistency.

LRC’s varied and revealing card triumphs

 

By Asher Butt and Abid Sultan

The Lahore Race Club has a varied and revealing card — two flukes, two favourites, and a place winner, with the September Cup delivering a clean book result. Here is the full verdict:

Race 1 — Division VII (1000m): Bella Nova (8-5), my fluke and the book's fluke, won the opening race in 1 minute 1.3/5 seconds — a satisfying fluke vindication but from the wrong column entirely. Both the book's favourite Bilal One (8-8) and my favourite Torpedo (9-0) were entirely unplaced. Gallop In Glory surging to second from 7-12 and Pocket Power (book's place, my place) running third means the frame was partially covered but the two top selections failed. The Division VII 1000m race continues to produce results that defy both weight and form logic — the winner came from mid-weight, the second from the bottom cluster, and both top selections missed.

Race 2 — Division VI (1000m): Gold Nation (9-2), the agreed favourite for both the book and me, won in 1 minute 0.1/5 seconds — a decisive, class-driven performance that validated the top weight call at the full distance. Royal Stone (book's fluke, my fluke) ran second — both selection sets correctly identified it as a frame contender. Largess completing the frame in third as a surprise means only the place selections missed. This was the cleanest race of the card and confirmed once again that at 1000m, the 9-2 top weight allocation carries decisive authority.

Race 3 — Division IV & V (1000m): Thunder Speed (8-6), the book's fluke, produced the day's biggest upset — winning over Raja The Great (9-2) and Fakhar-e-Sardar (9-0), the two joint top-weight selections that both the book and I agreed were the obvious first and second. Neither Raja The Great nor Fakhar-e-Sardar framed at all — a complete repudiation of the top-weight logic in this race. Dogar Choice ran a surprise second and Sea of Class (my fluke) completed the frame in third — the only saving grace from my selection set. Thunder Speed's win from 8-6 over two 9-pound-plus horses over 1000m in Division IV & V is one of the most analytically significant upsets of the Winter Meeting cycle so far.

Race 4 — The September Cup (1200m): Green Card (7-12), the book's favourite, won with ease — the book's clearest vindication of the meeting. Nisha (9-4, my favourite) ran second — meaning the horse I was most convinced about framed but did not win. Public Star (book's place, my place Pakiza finished where?) ran third. The full book frame was covered: Green Card first, Nisha (fluke) second, Public Star (place) third. My selection of Nisha as favourite was analytically sound — 9-4 carrying a 20-pound advantage over 1200m should win — but Green Card's exceptional form and pace on the day made the weight irrelevance once again. This is now the September Cup's defining result: form overcame an extraordinary weight disadvantage at the featured distance.

Race 5 — Division III & IV (1000m): Falco (8-6), the book's place selection and my fluke, won in 59.3/5 seconds — an excellent time that reflects a horse running well within itself. Emerging Star (book's favourite, 8-4) ran second — both book selections framing, just in reversed order. Haseeb Thunder completed the frame in third as a surprise. My favourite Zohan The Thunder (9-2) was unplaced — the third race where my top-weight selection failed to convert at 1000m on this card.

The September Cup Day conclusion: The card produced a fascinating split personality. Gold Nation and Green Card vindicated form-based and pace-based selections in Races 2 and 4. But Thunder Speed's upset in Race 3 over two joint top-weight horses and Bella Nova's fluke win in Race 1 confirmed that the 1000m distance is not a universal equaliser — it rewards weight authority selectively, not automatically. The critical lesson from Race 3 specifically: when Raja The Great (9-2) and Fakhar-e-Sardar (9-0) both fail to frame against Thunder Speed (8-6) over 1000m in Division IV & V, the weight-based system must acknowledge that horse-specific form and fitness on race day can override even the most commanding weight allocations.

Dr. Asad Abbas and the unseen war for Pakistan's sporting glory

 

 While the nation celebrates its champions, a quiet physician in the shadows keeps them standing, healing, and winning. He is one of the men behind the medal

 

By Asher Butt

Every nation has its heroes. Fewer nations know the names of the people who keep those heroes upright.

When Arshad Nadeem hurled the javelin into the Paris Olympics night and a billion hearts stopped, the cameras captured a moment of pure, unadulterated triumph. What the cameras did not capture was the months of quiet, painstaking work behind that throw—the sessions in recovery rooms, the late-night assessments, the calibrated programmes designed to squeeze one more ounce of performance from a body that had already given everything.

That work belonged to Dr. Asad Abbas.

There is a particular kind of person who chooses to stand in the shadows. Not out of modesty, though humility certainly plays its part, but out of a clear-eyed understanding of where the real work lies. In Pakistani sport, where the spotlight is unforgiving and often cruel, where victories are celebrated for a day and failures dissected for years, these people are the scaffolding upon which every triumph is built. Dr. Asad Abbas is one of them.

 

A life measured in repetitions

To understand the man, one must first understand the scale of what he does. Dr. Asad Abbas wears several hats, each of them weighty. He serves as Chief Medical Officer of the Asian Bodybuilding Federation. He sits on the Medical Commission of the Pakistan Olympic Association. He chairs the Medical Commission of the Asian Shooting Federation. For years, he was the doctor for the national hockey team—a role that, in a country where hockey once defined its sporting identity, carried its own form of national pressure.

And he was the physiotherapist for Arshad Nadeem.

That last title is the one that resonates most with the public, because Arshad Nadeem is not merely an athlete anymore. He is a symbol. He is the man who proved that Pakistan could produce an Olympic champion in athletics, a feat that had seemed almost mythological. But symbols need bodies. Bodies need care. And bodies, particularly those pushed to the limits of human performance, break down.

The work of keeping a world-class athlete functioning is not glamorous. It involves early mornings and late nights. It involves analysing gait patterns, monitoring recovery metrics, adjusting training loads, and having uncomfortable conversations about when to push and when to hold back. It involves being the voice that says "not today" when an athlete wants to say "always."

This is the language Dr. Asad speaks fluently.

 

The question nobody asks

There is a question that lingers at the heart of Pakistan's sporting struggles, and it is one that rarely makes it onto television panels or newspaper columns.

When a team loses, we ask the coach. When an athlete underperforms, we question the federation. When a campaign falters, we blame the selectors. But how often do we ask about nutrition? How often do we examine sleep quality, recovery systems, or whether an injury was managed properly and in time?

The answers to those questions, more often than not, determine whether a medal is won or lost before the athlete even steps onto the field. Modern sport has moved far beyond the romantic notion of natural talent alone. Today's champions are built in laboratories as much as on fields—through sports science, data analysis, and meticulous attention to the invisible details that separate the good from the great.

Dr. Asad understands this with a clarity that borders on the evangelical. He speaks of sports medicine not as a supplement to training, but as its foundation. He argues, persistently and with the patience of a teacher, that Pakistan cannot achieve consistent success on the world stage until it begins to view sport through a scientific lens.

It is an argument that should be self-evident. That it is not says something about how we, as a sporting nation, have chosen to see ourselves.

 

The teacher in the room

What sets Dr. Asad apart is not merely his expertise but his refusal to keep it contained.

There is a version of success in Pakistan that is measured by position and proximity to power. A doctor with his credentials could easily confine himself to elite athletes and prestigious committees, collecting titles and attending conferences. Dr. Asad has done neither. Instead, he has taken his knowledge to the places where it might plant seeds—medical colleges, universities, and sports institutions across the country.

Through seminars and workshops, he has spoken to young athletes, students, coaches, and parents. He has explained, in language that is accessible rather than academic, why the body needs to be prepared before it is pushed. Why nutrition is not an afterthought. Why recovery is not laziness. Why the culture of "no pain, no gain" has destroyed more careers than it has built.

This is the work of a builder, not a self-promoter. A doctor who stays in his clinic treats patients. A doctor who goes out and speaks builds a system.

 

The architecture of a medal

When Arshad Nadeem's javelin landed and history was made, the nation celebrated a singular achievement. What was less visible was the architecture behind it.

A medal, as Dr. Asad often points out, is won in seconds. But behind those seconds lie years of accumulated discipline—thousands of hours of training, hundreds of hours of rehabilitation, and a system of monitoring that ensures the body is not just ready but resilient. Behind every great athlete is a physiotherapist who understood their injury, a doctor who managed their recovery, and a support system that treated their body as a long-term project rather than a disposable tool.

Pakistan has produced remarkable athletes—Arshad Nadeem, Inam Butt, and countless others who have carried the national flag onto global stages. But it has not yet built the system that produces them consistently. Too often, success arrives despite the system rather than because of it. Talent emerges, burns bright for a moment, and fades because the frame around it was never strong enough.

Dr. Asad Abbas represents a different possibility. A future in which sports medicine is not an emergency service called upon when something goes wrong, but an integral part of every athlete's journey from the very beginning.

 

The unseen battles

There is a particular loneliness to the work of the sports physician. The athlete receives the applause. The coach receives the credit. The administrator receives the press conference. The doctor receives the anxiety—the quiet, concerning fear that a missed diagnosis or a miscalculated recovery timeline could end a career or cost a nation a medal.

This burden is rarely acknowledged. It is carried in silence, in the long hours spent studying scans and recovery data, in the difficult conversations with athletes who want to push through pain, in the knowledge that the line between care and caution is often razor-thin.

Dr. Asad has walked that line for years. He has served as the doctor for the Pakistan hockey team, where he witnessed both the glory of a sport that once defined the nation and its slow, painful decline. He has worked with bodybuilders, shooters, and athletes from a dizzying array of disciplines. He has served as Chief Medical Officer for the national contingent at the Asian Games in Japan, ensuring that hundreds of athletes received the care they needed to compete at their best.

Through it all, he has maintained a singular focus: the athlete. Not the politics. Not the prestige. The athlete.

 

Building an ecosystem, not a resume

If you ask Dr. Asad what he does, he will not recite his titles. He will talk about the need for sports scientists in the training room. He will talk about the importance of teaching children about fitness before they ever step onto a field. He will talk about the gap between what Pakistani athletes deserve and what they currently receive.

This is the mindset of someone who views his expertise as national service rather than personal gain. It is a mindset that Pakistan desperately needs more of.

A nation that invests in its athletes only after they succeed is a nation that will always be chasing rather than leading. A nation that builds the infrastructure of sports medicine—physiotherapy setups, recovery facilities, nutrition programmes, and qualified practitioners—is a nation that gives its talent a genuine chance to flourish.

Dr. Asad Abbas is not the only person doing this work. But he is one of the most visible, and his voice carries weight precisely because it is not raised in self-promotion. It is raised in service.

 

The quiet victory

In the end, the story of Dr. Asad Abbas is not one of medals. It is one of presence—the steady, reliable presence of someone who understands that the body is both an athlete's greatest asset and their most fragile one.

He is not on the podium. He is not in the headlines. He is not the face of Pakistani sport. But when Arshad Nadeem threw, when Inam Butt wrestled, when Pakistani athletes across the world competed with the weight of a nation on their shoulders, he was there. Not as a spectator, but as a builder. As a healer. As the quiet force that made the performance possible.

Pakistan needs more people like Dr. Asad Abbas. It needs a system that values the work done in the shadows as much as the work done under the lights. It needs a sporting culture that understands that medals are not won in moments of genius alone, but in the years of preparation that precede them.

If that system is built, and if that culture takes root, then winning will no longer be a matter of chance or of individual brilliance defying the odds. It will become a tradition. A habit. A certainty.

And the quiet builders—the doctors, the physiotherapists, the sports scientists—will finally receive the recognition they have always deserved.

Not because they sought it. But because, without them, there would be no victories to celebrate at all.

Dr. Asad Abbas continues his work in sports medicine, serving athletes across Pakistan and beyond, driven by a simple belief: that behind every great athlete must stand a great system.

Dr. Urooj Mumtaz: The captain who never really left the field

 

From leading Pakistan at 21 to becoming the first Pakistani woman to commentate on a men's ODI, Urooj Mumtaz's journey is a masterclass in refusing to choose just one dream

 

By Asher Butt

There is a peculiar moment that Urooj Mumtaz Khan recalls from her playing days. She was captaining Pakistan, leading a national side onto the field, and then, depending on the day, she would switch gears and head into a dental clinic to treat patients. To most, these two worlds—the high-stakes arena of international cricket and the precise, delicate work of dentistry—could not be more distant. For Urooj, they were simply different rooms in the same life she refused to compartmentalize.

That refusal to be defined by a single identity has come to define one of the most remarkable careers in Pakistani sport. Born on October 1, 1985, in Karachi, Urooj Mumtaz built a reputation not just as a cricketer, but as a cricketer who happened to be a dentist, a commentator, a selector, and, in time, a trailblazer whose influence extended way past the boundary ropes.

Her path to cricket was not the product of a structured academy. It began, as many great sporting stories do, in the informal crucible of childhood—playing with her father, her uncle, and the neighbourhood boys at Karachi Gymkhana. She was six years old when her father enrolled her in the club's under-nine team, making her the only girl among the boy players. By her teenage years, she had progressed to the under-17 squad and even captained it, earning her place through sheer performance despite the skepticism that greeted a girl in a boys' game.

The 1992 World Cup, broadcast into her family home when she was seven, sealed something in her imagination. Watching Imran Khan's cornered tigers—and the electric athleticism of a Jonty Rhodes run-out—showed her a version of cricket that was not just a sport but a form of theatre, a test of nerve and character.

She made her international debut for Pakistan in March 2004, at just 18 years old. The numbers from her playing career are modest on paper: one Test, 38 ODIs, nine T20Is. But the numbers never told the full story with Urooj. She was an all-rounder in the truest sense—a right-handed batter and leg-break bowler who contributed with both bat and ball.  More importantly, she became a leader.

At 21, she was handed the captaincy. She would go on to lead Pakistan in 26 of her 38 ODIs, including the 2009 Women's World Cup in Australia, where she steered her side to victories over West Indies and Sri Lanka.  That she was captaining a national team while simultaneously completing her dental degree at Fatima Jinnah Dental College is a testament to a work ethic that would become her signature. She graduated as a dentist in 2008, having already been captaining her country for over two years.

The captaincy was not without its turbulence. In May 2009, ahead of the T20 World Cup in England, the PCB replaced her as skipper with Sana Mir, though Urooj remained part of the squad.  It was a difficult moment, but it also foreshadowed the next chapter of her life: rather than fading from view, Urooj would simply change the lens through which she viewed the game.

She retired from international cricket in 2010, at just 25, choosing to step away rather than linger past her best. "I never intended playing for 10 or 15 years as I believed in stepping aside and giving new players a chance," she would later explain.  It was a decision that spoke to a maturity beyond her years—a recognition that legacy is not built solely on the field.

The years that followed were a blur of reinvention. She pursued a Master of Medical Science in Restorative Dentistry at the University of Sheffield in the UK, graduating in 2012, and returned to Karachi to run her family's dental practice, Khan's Dental Clinic.  But cricket was never far from her orbit.

In March 2019, the PCB appointed her to head the first-ever all-women selection panel for the national women's team—a landmark moment in the governance of the sport.  She later served as the board's Head of Women's Cricket, a role she held alongside her selection duties until stepping down in May 2021. Her tenure was not without controversy; former player Batool Fatima accused her of dropping Sana Mir from the 2020 T20 World Cup squad due to personal grudges, allegations Urooj firmly refuted, citing Mir's inconsistent performances.  The episode illustrated the scrutiny that comes with power, but also her willingness to make difficult calls in the pursuit of progress.

It is in the commentary box, however, that Urooj Mumtaz has perhaps made her most visible mark. In October 2020, during a men's ODI between Pakistan and Zimbabwe in Rawalpindi, she became the first Pakistani woman to commentate on a men's international match.  It was a glass-ceiling moment, and she has not looked back. She has since become a fixture on the Pakistan Super League's English commentary panel, alongside legends like Wasim Akram and Ramiz Raja, and has covered international series across the globe, including for Sky Sports and the DP World ILT20.

Her commentary is marked by insight and composure—the product of a player's understanding and an administrator's perspective. When Babar Azam scored a century against Australia in 2022, her commentary became a viral moment, praised for its emotional resonance and technical clarity.  Indian journalist Vikrant Gupta called her "the best addition to the Pakistani commentary box." For young women across Pakistan, she is more than a voice; she is proof that the box is not closed to them.

In July 2025, the University of Sheffield awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters (Hon LittD) for her contributions to cricket and dentistry, a recognition that underscored the duality of her life.  She was also named Dental News Personality of 2024, an acknowledgment of her continued commitment to her medical profession.

Today, Urooj Mumtaz continues to practice dentistry at Khan's Dental Clinic while maintaining her demanding commentary schedule. The anecdotes are telling: patients sometimes come in saying they don't need a check-up, they just wanted to meet her. Cricketers who recognize her in the clinic are surprised to discover she actually practices.  It is a life lived in the intersections, and she navigates it with grace.

What makes Urooj Mumtaz's story so compelling is not just the list of achievements—the captaincy, the dentistry, the commentary, the selection panels. It is the way she has consistently refused to accept that these identities must be mutually exclusive. In a society that often asks women to choose between profession and passion, between family and career, between the clinic and the commentary box, Urooj has simply said: why not all of it?

She was a captain at 21, a dentist before she retired, a selector in her thirties, and a broadcaster who broke barriers. She has been a pioneer at every stage, not by declaring herself one, but by simply doing the work and refusing to be boxed in.

For a generation of Pakistani women who have watched her, the message is unmistakable. The field is wide. The possibilities are not finite. And if Urooj Mumtaz can wear multiple hats—and wear them well—so can they.

Pakistan cricket: From collapse to chaos, system failure

 

By Asher Butt

Pakistan’s Test tours of the West Indies and England have exposed something far more disturbing than a team going through a bad patch. The defeats, the batting collapses, the selection blunders and, finally, the extraordinary mid-tour purge have together revealed a cricket system that appears incapable of distinguishing between genuine reform and frantic activity. Pakistan did not merely lose matches. It repeatedly lost its way.

The West Indies tour should have been a warning. Instead, it became the prelude to the catastrophe in England.

Pakistan split the two-Test series in the Caribbean, winning the second Test by eight wickets after losing the opener by 90 runs. Yet even in defeat, the first Test contained the central disease that would later become impossible to disguise. Pakistan made 282 in reply to West Indies’ 311 and then, chasing only 211, collapsed to 120, with Babar Azam unbeaten on 58 while almost everyone around him disappeared. The numbers were not an isolated embarrassment. Pakistan had the worst second-innings batting average among the nine teams in the World Test Championship over the preceding two years — just 19.90 — with an extraordinary 11.03-point gap between their first- and second-innings averages.

The second Test temporarily disguised the disease. Abdullah Shafique produced a superb 160, Babar made 88, and Pakistan finally converted a strong position into victory. But even there the message was unmistakable: when the top order survived, Pakistan could compete; when it collapsed, there was precious little underneath it.

Then came England.

At Headingley, Pakistan were dismantled for 171 and 135, losing by an innings and 103 runs. Ollie Robinson and Josh Tongue exploited weaknesses that were not subtle. Pakistan’s batting was tentative, technically uncertain and unable to withstand sustained pressure. England made 409, with Harry Brook, Jordan Cox, Joe Root and Dan Lawrence all contributing substantial scores. Pakistan never recovered.

Lord’s was supposed to be the response. Instead, Pakistan produced 110 in the first innings. Robinson destroyed them with 4-11. England then made 208 and Pakistan, chasing 389, fought briefly through Saud Shakeel’s magnificent 97, but still folded for 194. The defeat was by 194 runs.

At that point the series was over — and that is precisely when Pakistan cricket’s administrators appeared to lose their heads.

Seven players were sent home. Head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul were removed. Mike Hesson, the white-ball coach, was brought in for a Test match, while a group of replacements, including several uncapped players, were hurriedly introduced. The timing was breathtakingly poor. The people who had selected the original squad were effectively admitting, after two matches, that their own selection process had failed. Yet instead of questioning that process, they punished the products of it.

This is the great Pakistani cricket paradox: when the system fails, the system survives.

Players are changed. Coaches are changed. Captains are changed. Selectors are changed. Portfolios are redistributed. Press conferences are held. Strong words are issued. And then, eventually, the same failures return.

The numbers make the indictment difficult to escape. Pakistan went into the third England Test having lost 15 of their previous 20 Tests, while the broader material supplied records 16 defeats in 21 after Edgbaston. They had also endured a succession of coaching and captaincy changes. The World Test Championship table became an especially humiliating mirror: Pakistan were again at the bottom.

And yet the response was not a long-term red-ball programme. It was another purge.

The third Test demonstrated why that approach is so dangerous. Pakistan made only 133 in the first innings, collapsing to 48 for five and then 84 for seven. England replied with 453. Only Razaullah’s extraordinary 81 and Mohammad Abbas’s 42 rescued Pakistan from complete humiliation in the second innings as they reached 449. The 316-run ninth-wicket partnership? No — the actual ninth-wicket stand was 121, and that distinction matters because even the dramatic rescue tells its own story: Pakistan’s recognised batting had already failed before the tailenders produced the entertainment. England then chased 130 with ease, winning by eight wickets and completing a 3-0 whitewash.

Razaullah’s innings was exhilarating. But it should not become another convenient excuse. A team cannot build a Test strategy around a No. 9 producing nine sixes after the top order has collapsed.

The England series also exposed the opening problem brutally. Three different opening combinations were tried, yet Pakistan repeatedly lost early wickets. The batting was not simply short of runs; it lacked a repeatable method for surviving difficult spells. There was too much uncertainty over technique, temperament and shot selection.

And then there is the question of accountability.

Was it the players’ fault? Yes, partly. International cricketers must accept responsibility. Some of the shots were indefensible. Some performances were timid. Some players did not demonstrate the temperament expected at Test level.

But the blame cannot stop there.

If the selectors selected them, the coaches coached them, the high-performance structure developed them, and the board appointed the people responsible for all of it, then responsibility travels upwards. The repeated habit of sacrificing players after systemic failures is not accountability. It is ‘SCAPEGOATING’.

The disciplinary controversy made the situation even uglier. An inquiry was launched amid reports concerning discipline and conduct, while speculation also surrounded the handling of players’ phones and communications. The PCB itself stressed that the allegations were not established and that due process would be followed. That distinction must be respected. Yet the mere fact that such controversy engulfed the team during a disastrous Test tour demonstrated how badly the cricket operation had lost its focus. It’s a clear sign of system failure.

Aaqib Javed’s public questioning of Imam-ul-Haq’s injury further inflamed matters. If an injury is suspected of being genuine or otherwise, investigate it professionally and privately. National cricket cannot be run through public insinuation.

Nor can it be run through perpetual administrative musical chairs.

Pakistan has had multiple captains, coaches, selectors and senior officials in rapid succession. The material supplied records five PCB chairmen in five years and three Test captains and six Test head coaches over three years. That is not a development pathway; it is institutional instability.

The modern game has moved on. Leading cricket boards use data, sports science, biomechanics, specialist coaching, workload management, analytics and long-term talent identification. Pakistan still too often relies on personalities, relationships, reputation and short-term reactions. The supplied analysis is right to identify this as a structural problem rather than merely a technical one.

Mohsin Naqvi therefore has a choice, and it is a much bigger choice than deciding which player to drop.

He must stop rewarding activity and start demanding outcomes.

Every senior position should have measurable objectives. Selectors should be judged on the quality and continuity of their selections. Coaches should be judged over meaningful periods, not five matches. High-performance officials should have defined responsibilities and performance indicators. No individual should be allowed to move from one powerful cricketing position to another simply because failure has occurred in the previous one.

Most importantly, Pakistan needs a proper red-ball strategy.

The domestic first-class structure must become the foundation, not a waiting room. Players need sustained four-day cricket before being thrown into England, Australia or South Africa. A specialist batting programme should identify why Pakistan’s second innings collapses so frequently. Openers need technical preparation against the moving ball. Fast bowlers need workload planning. Spinners need overseas development. Fielding, catching and running between wickets must be treated as professional disciplines.

Selection must also stop being a referendum on reputations.

Babar Azam, Shan Masood, Mohammad Rizwan, Saud Shakeel and every other senior player should be selected on current red-ball value, not nostalgia. Equally, youngsters must not be thrown into Test cricket simply because the administration needs a headline after a defeat.

The West Indies offered warning. England delivered humiliation. The worst response would be another reshuffle.

Pakistan cricket does not need more noise. It needs architecture.

The country still has talent. It still has an extraordinary cricket culture and a fan base that has tolerated more disappointment than almost any sporting public should be expected to endure. The problem is that talent without development, passion without planning and money without professional governance eventually produce exactly what England exposed: a side that can occasionally produce brilliance but cannot sustain competence.

The 3-0 defeat is therefore not merely a series result. It is an audit.

And the audit has failed the players, the coaches, the selectors and, above all, the system, run by Mohsin Naqvi, that keeps appointing, removing and reappointing the same categories of people while expecting different results.

Pakistan cricket does not need another sacrifice.

It needs accountability at the top, stability underneath, merit throughout and patience long enough for genuine reform to take root.

The captain who carries too much

 

Pakistan’s Asia Cup story is becoming Fatima Sana’s burden

Another semi-final, another defeat, another night when Pakistan’s skipper stood tallest while those around her fell away

 

By Asher Butt

The sight is becoming achingly familiar. Fatima Sana, ball in hand or bat in grip, dragging Pakistan back from the brink. Then, when the dust settles and the opposition celebrates, she is left standing alone, her all-round brilliance recorded in the scorebook but absent from the result that matters.

On Friday night at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium, it happened again. Pakistan 130 for 5. Fatima 47 not out from 36 balls. Then, with the ball, two wickets in her opening over — Chamari Athapaththu and Sanjana Kavindi, the latter a golden duck — and two more later, finishing with 4 for 38. Player of the Match. On the losing side. Sri Lanka chased 131 with eight balls to spare to reach the final, and Pakistan’s Women’s T20 Asia Cup ended at the semi-final stage for the third successive time, all three defeats coming at the hands of the defending champions.

This is the story of Pakistan’s tournament: moments of genuine quality, flashes of promise, and a captain performing at a level that deserves more than the support she is getting.

 

When the captain had to bat, bowl, and almost field alone

The numbers paint a stark picture. Fatima’s 407 T20I runs in 2026 have come at a strike rate of 150.74 — the fourth-best in the world this year. Her 23 wickets are the most for Pakistan. She is, by most measures, the best cricketer Pakistan currently has across men’s and women’s cricket. One analyst, writing after the tournament, put it simply: “In the last two years, among Pakistan’s male and female T20 cricketers, the one who has most consistently produced top-tier performances is Fatima Sana.”

Yet Pakistan keep losing when it matters most.

The semi-final followed a pattern now etched into the team’s recent history. Pakistan’s top order — Muneeba Ali, Ayesha Zafar, Sadaf Shamas — fell for single digits. Shawaal Zulfiqar, the one bright spark at the top, fell for 24 after a promising start. At 52 for 4, Pakistan were sinking. Fatima walked in, absorbed the pressure, and rebuilt with Gull Feroza (21) and Tuba Hassan (12 not out), taking 47 runs off the final five overs to post something defendable.

Then she took the new ball and ripped out Sri Lanka’s top order. At 33 for 4, Pakistan were favourites.

But Harshitha Samarawickrama and Kavisha Dilhari shared 67 runs off 59 balls to drag Sri Lanka back. Fatima returned to remove both in the 17th over, leaving 22 needed off 18. Then Nilakshika Silva and Kaushini Nuthyangana put on an unbeaten 25 off 12 balls, and the game was gone. Fatima’s figures read 4-0-38-4. Her team lost by four wickets.

“I thought 130 was a fighting total, but we didn’t field well,” she said afterwards. “We gave away too many runs in the field and the batting collapse in the middle overs hurt us.” It was a captain speaking honestly, but also a captain speaking alone.

 

The collapse that defined the tournament

If the semi-final was a heartbreak, the group-stage match against India was a scar. Pakistan were bowled out for 55 — their lowest-ever total in women’s T20 internationals — in 18.1 overs after a promising opening stand of 27. From 27 for 0 to 55 all out, Pakistan lost nine wickets for 28 runs. Three batters failed to score. The collapse was so complete, so clinical in its brutality, that it raised uncomfortable questions about the team’s mental resilience under pressure.

Team mentor Wahab Riaz, speaking after the defeat, was candid. “Under pressure, the decision-making is very important,” he said. “I think that is where we lost the game.”

He was right. But decision-making under pressure is not a switch that can be flipped in a team meeting. It is built through exposure, through experience, through the confidence that comes from knowing that if you fail, someone else will step up. Pakistan’s batting, at present, does not have that safety net.

 

The wins that showed what could be

It would be unfair to paint the entire tournament as a failure. Pakistan won two of their three group matches, and one of those wins produced a moment of genuine history.

Against Hong Kong, Nashra Sundhu claimed 6 for 7 — the best bowling figures by any Pakistan woman in T20Is, surpassing Omaima Sohail’s 5 for 13 from 2022. Shawaal Zulfiqar’s aggressive 47 from 35 balls had set up the total of 143 for 8, and Sundhu’s mastery dismantled Hong Kong for 71. It was a performance of control and clinical execution.

The opening win over Thailand was similarly composed. Muneeba Ali’s fourth T20I half-century — 54 from 52 balls — anchored the innings, while Sadia Iqbal’s 3 for 11, including a double-wicket maiden, broke the chase early. Pakistan won by 35 runs.

These were the performances that showed what Pakistan could be: a team with genuine bowling depth, a top-order batter capable of anchoring an innings, and a fielding unit that, when focused, can support the bowlers.

But the gap between what Pakistan can be and what they are in the biggest moments remains wide.

 

The supporting cast: Promise and inconsistency

The tournament revealed both the depth and the fragility of Pakistan’s squad. Muneeba Ali finished as one of the team’s leading run-scorers, her 54 against Thailand a reminder of her class. Shawaal Zulfiqar, the 20-year-old opener, showed glimpses of the aggression that Pakistan have long needed at the top, though her returns were inconsistent. Ayesha Zafar, Sadia Iqbal, Tuba Hassan, and Umm-e-Hani all contributed in moments, but none consistently imposed themselves across the tournament.

The fielding, in particular, remains a concern. Dropped catches, misfields, and a lack of intensity in the ring cost Pakistan crucial runs. Fatima acknowledged as much after the semi-final: “We gave away too many runs in the field.” In tight matches against quality opposition, those runs are the difference between winning and losing.

 

Where does Pakistan go from here?

The Asia Cup exit should not be treated as a crisis, but it must be treated as a wake-up call. Pakistan women’s cricket has made real progress in recent years — the emergence of players like Shawaal and Eyman Fatima, the improvement in fitness standards, and the growing number of players earning overseas opportunities all point in the right direction. But progress is not the same as success, and Pakistan are still waiting for their first major title.

Three areas require urgent attention.

First, the batting order needs to be rebuilt around a clear plan. Pakistan’s collapses against India and Sri Lanka exposed a lack of structure and an over-reliance on too few players. The middle order must be given time to settle, and the top order must learn to absorb pressure rather than retreat into their shells.

Second, the captain needs more support. Fatima Sana cannot continue to be Pakistan’s best batter, best bowler, and best fielder in every match. Others must step up — not occasionally, but consistently. The team’s senior players, in particular, must take responsibility for delivering in crucial moments.

Third, the fielding must improve. This is not a matter of talent but of focus, fitness, and preparation. Dropped catches and poor ground fielding are habits that can be broken with disciplined coaching and a culture of accountability.

 

A captain’s legacy in the making

Fatima Sana is 24 years old. She has already captained Pakistan in a T20 World Cup, become the first Pakistani woman to play in The Hundred, and produced performances that have earned praise from across the cricketing world. She is, by any measure, a remarkable talent.

But greatness in leadership is not measured by individual brilliance alone. It is measured by the ability to elevate those around you, to build a team that can win even when the captain has an off day. Fatima is not yet at that point — not because she lacks the will or the skill, but because the system around her has not given her the tools to succeed.

The Asia Cup was a reminder that Pakistan women’s cricket is on the right path, but also that the path is steep. The semi-final defeat to Sri Lanka was painful, but it was not humiliating. It was a contest that Pakistan could have won, should have won, and lost because of familiar failings.

For now, Fatima will return to Pakistan with her Player of the Match award and her captain’s armband. She will continue to carry the burden, because that is what leaders do. But if Pakistan are to win the titles they covet, she cannot carry it alone.

The Asia Cup is over. The question now is whether Pakistan can learn its lessons before the next opportunity arrives.

Wasim Akram: The man behind the swing

 

The man behind the swing: Wasim Akram's greatest innings was always off the field

He took 916 international wickets and made batsmen across the world look foolish. But the pitch that truly tested the Sultan of Swing was not made of grass. It was made of grief, love, and the slow, difficult work of becoming whole again.

 

By Asher Butt

 

There is a moment in the career of every fast bowler when the body begins to speak before the mind is ready to listen. The knees carry the memory of ten thousand run-ups. The shoulder holds the arithmetic of a hundred thousand deliveries. And somewhere in the arc of the inswinger — that devastating, late-moving, unhittable delivery that Wasim Akram bent around the laws of physics itself — there lives the ghost of a young man from Lahore who had no idea, when he first laced his boots, that cricket would be the easier half of his life.

Wasim Akram was born on 3 June 1966, in Lahore, into a Punjabi family in a city that understood fast bowling the way it understood good food and warm conversation — as something essential, something that required no justification, something that was simply part of the air you breathed if you grew up within earshot of a cricket ground. He was raw, spectacularly talented, and entirely unpredictable when Javed Miandad first saw him bowl in a local match and Imran Khan, with the instinct of one great cricketer recognising another, called him into the national team when Wasim was barely eighteen years old.

What followed is the stuff of legend — not the cautious, heavily footnoted legend of the textbooks, but the vivid, alive, slightly unbelievable legend that people who watched it still struggle to describe accurately. 104 Test matches. 356 ODIs. 916 international wickets combined. A World Cup, lifted in Melbourne in 1992 under Imran Khan's leadership, with Wasim at the absolute height of his powers. A captaincy that revealed intelligence and stubbornness in roughly equal measure. And the bowling — always the bowling — which moved late and fast and in both directions from the same release point, which made grown men who had faced the world's fastest bowlers close their eyes and say a quiet prayer before facing the first ball of the morning.

But this is not a story about cricket. It is a story about what happens after.

 

The woman he called home

In 1995, Wasim Akram married Huma Mufti — and for the years of their marriage, she was the quiet architecture of his personal life. While the world watched him curve the ball around corners that seemed geometrically impossible, Huma kept the household, raised their two sons, Tahmoor and Akbar, and watched her husband carry an entire nation's expectations on a left shoulder that was somehow still standing after everything it had been asked to do.

The world does not often think about the wives of fast bowlers. The fast bowler is the story — the run-up, the celebration, the wicket. But Huma Akram was something the cameras could not capture: the person who made it possible for Wasim to walk onto a field carrying nothing but the ball, because she had taken everything else off him at the door.

Then, in October 2009, she was gone.

Multiple organ failure. She was 42 years old. Wasim was 43. Their boys were teenagers. And one of the most formidable men in cricket — a man who had dismissed the world's best batsmen in conditions that should have been impossible, who had stood at the crease in one-day finals with the match on his shoulders and produced cricket of supernatural quality — was left standing in the silence of a house that had been rearranged by grief into something unrecognisable.

He has spoken about that period rarely and carefully, the way people speak about wounds that have healed enough to be touched but not enough to be examined too directly. The years between 2009 and 2013 were, by any honest account, the hardest of his life. A single father. Two sons finding their footing in a world that had been altered without their permission. A man whose identity had been built around performance and precision, suddenly confronted by a grief that had no technique to defeat it, no line and length to fall back on, no field setting that would contain it.

He kept going. That is perhaps the most honest and the most understated thing that can be said about Wasim Akram in those years: he kept going.

 

The woman who found him

She was from Melbourne. She had a career in public relations and social work. She had never, she would later admit with the cheerful directness that would make her a beloved public figure in Pakistan, been remotely interested in cricket. Her name was Shaniera Thompson, and when she met Wasim Akram, she met not the Sultan of Swing but a man — a warm, funny, occasionally difficult, deeply loyal man who was trying to rebuild a life from materials that grief had scattered.

They married in August 2013, in a simple ceremony in Lahore. Shaniera had converted to Islam before the wedding. She arrived in Pakistan with no roadmap, no inherited understanding of the culture, and an openness that the country — which can be brutal to those it perceives as outsiders — recognised immediately as genuine. She learned. She adapted. She embraced. And Pakistan, in turn, embraced her back with a warmth that surprised even its most cynical observers.

The public nicknamed her — with the particular affection that Pakistanis reserve for the people they have decided to claim as their own — the "national Bhabhi." The Aussie Princess. She became, through social media and public appearances and genuine philanthropic work, a beloved figure who transcended the category of celebrity spouse and became something more interesting: a person in her own right, admired for her intelligence and her warmth and her absolute refusal to be merely decorative.

She also, and this detail matters more than the public discourse around it usually acknowledges, became a mother to Tahmoor and Akbar. Not a replacement mother. Not a stepmother in the cold, transactional sense that the word sometimes implies. A woman who walked into a household carrying the memory of another woman and made the brave, quiet choice to honour that memory by loving the boys that Huma had left behind.

 

Aiyla and the colour that returns

In December 2014, Wasim and Shaniera welcomed a daughter. They named her Aiyla Sabeen Rose Akram — a name that carries Pakistan in one syllable and something gentler and more personal in the rest. She is, by all accounts, the delight of both her parents in the way that only the very young can be: without agenda, without history, purely and entirely present in her own joy.

Wasim Akram posting photographs of Aiyla on social media — the Sultan of Swing who once made Sachin Tendulkar look fallible, now being led by the hand by a small girl who has inherited his eyes and her mother's spirit — is one of the more quietly extraordinary things that fame occasionally produces: the revelation that inside the legend was always a person, and that the person was always, primarily, a father.

Tahmoor, the elder son, has taken a path that would have surprised almost anyone who watched his father bowl in the 1992 World Cup final. He moved to the United States. He is carving out a career as a mixed martial arts fighter — a sport that requires the same physical courage and mental discipline as fast bowling, while sharing almost nothing else with it. He chose his own arena. In that, he is entirely his father's son.

 

The transformation

There is one more chapter to the personal story of Wasim Akram that deserves to be told, because it is not about grief or love or fatherhood — it is about the relationship between a man and his own body, and what it means to reclaim that relationship after the years of punishment that a fast bowler's life imposes.

In the years after his marriage to Shaniera, Wasim underwent a physical transformation that those who had known him across the decades found almost startling. He lost significant weight. He adopted a disciplined approach to nutrition and exercise. He returned, not to the body of a fast bowler in his prime, but to something arguably more impressive — the body of a man in his late forties who had decided, with the same absolute commitment he had once brought to the art of swing bowling, that the second half of his life would not be defined by the physical cost of the first.

Shaniera was central to this. She has spoken openly about how they motivated each other, how the shared commitment to health became a shared language between them, how it was simultaneously an act of self-care and an act of love. Wasim Akram, who had spent the better part of thirty years doing extraordinary things to his left shoulder, was now doing something quieter and more sustainable: taking care.

 

What remains

Today, Wasim Akram moves between Pakistan and Australia with the ease of a man who has made his peace with belonging to more than one place. He works as a commentator and mentor, bringing to the television screen the same analytical intelligence he brought to the crease. He speaks with the authority of someone who has not merely watched the game from the boundary but has stood in its centre and bent it to his will.

He has, in other words, built a life that is proportionate to the cricket — which is saying something, because the cricket was extraordinary.

But what lingers, after the statistics have been catalogued and the highlights have been replayed and the experts have reached their verdicts on where exactly he ranks among the all-time greats of the game, is something simpler and more human than any of that. A man from Lahore who lost his wife at 43 and raised his sons alone, who found love again when he was perhaps least expecting it, who became a father for the third time at 48, who learned — slowly, imperfectly, the way all of us learn — that the most important innings of a life are never the ones that happen on a cricket ground.

The ball swings late. It always does with Wasim Akram. You think you have it read, and then it moves, and you are beaten before you have finished the shot. His life has moved that way too — surprising and devastating and, ultimately, beautiful in the way that only things which have been genuinely tested can be.

The Sultan of Swing is still swinging. Just not with a ball in his hand.

 

Wasim Akram, born 3 June 1966 in Lahore, took 916 international wickets across 104 Tests and 356 ODIs, captained Pakistan, and won the 1992 Cricket World Cup. He married Shaniera Thompson in 2013. They have a daughter, Aiyla, born December 2014. He has two sons, Tahmoor and Akbar, from his first marriage to Huma Mufti, who passed away in October 2009.