Pakistan lose Test series to England 0–3 amid personnel crisis
Pakistan's cricket team lost the Test series to England 0–3 after defeat in the third match at Edgbaston Stadium in Birmingham, United Kingdom. During the tour, the team failed to score more than 200 runs in five of six innings, and a coaching change before the final Test did not affect the result.
As Dawn reports, head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul were dismissed from their positions. Seven players were dropped from the squad, while Pakistan's limited-overs coach Mike Hesson led the national team in the third and final Test.
The National Cyber Crime Agency also investigated the dropped players Mohammad Rizwan and Imam-ul-Haq over allegations of leaking team information.
A series of poor results
The defeat at Edgbaston was Pakistan's 16th in their last 21 Test matches. The team is ninth and last in the World Test Championship table, the same position in which it finished the previous cycle.
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Over the past three years, Pakistan's Test team has changed three captains and six head coaches. The Pakistan Cricket Board has also had five different chairmen in five years, which, according to the outlet, has affected the consistency of cricket development planning.
The team's performances in shorter formats were also unsuccessful: last year, Pakistan was eliminated in the first round of the ODI Champions Trophy, while at the 2026 T20 World Cup it failed to reach the semi-finals. Two years earlier, the national team finished the tournament at the group stage, including after losing to the United States team.
Reaction from former players
Former Pakistan captain Wasim Akram told AFP that he had expected such a decline for the past five years and that it could not be explained by one person or one factor. He also pointed to a lack of talent in Test cricket.
Former leg-spinner and 1992 World Cup winner Mushtaq Ahmed linked the decline to a lack of planning and said that fixing the situation would take time. Former player Shahid Afridi called this a bleak period for Pakistani cricket and criticized the treatment of athletes and the weakness of the system.
