How Pakistan lost the plot at the Champions Trophy

That Pakistan have crashed out of the Champions Trophy is now ancient history. But the excuses for the debacle have continued to flow unabated. The strangest one among them probably comes from former skipper Aamir Sohail, who believes that the root cause of Pakistan’s problems is Imran Khan. Most experts hold Imran in high repute because he guided Pakistan to a World Cup win in 1992 and united them as a team in trying times. But Sohail obviously isn’t one of them. “I want to say clearly here and for once we must face the truth that Imran is responsible for the state of affairs in our cricket,” Sohail said on a TV channel , leaving the other two guests on the show – Zaheer Abbas and Younus Khan – surprised. [caption id=“attachment_882579” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] According to Aamir Sohail, Imran Khan is responsible for Pakistan’s current woes. Getty Images[/caption] “Imran damaged Pakistan cricket by encouraging our bowlers to tamper with the ball. This has led to a culture where we can`t produce good new ball bowlers or quality openers.” It was surprising simply because the losses at the Champions Trophy had more to do with the ineptitude of the batsmen than anything else. And then Pakistan couldn’t produce quality openers because they couldn’t cope with the tampered ball? We’ll leave it at that. Meanwhile, in the Dawn newspaper, Navjot Singh Sidhu added his own spin to things. “Omitting Afridi was a huge blunder by Pakistan,” Sidhu told Dawn.com . “He’s a world-class player. He wasn’t in form but big tournaments like these bring out the best in big players. By leaving him out, Pakistan handed half the advantage to the opposition even before taking the field.” Afridi has scored 142 runs and taken just three wickets in nine One-Day Internationals (ODIs) in the last 12 months but Sidhu surprisingly felt he could have made the difference. And of course, if Afridi alone can’t do the trick, there are always other oldies to fall back on. “Dropping Shahid Afridi and Younus and naming Shoaib Malik and Imran Farhat in the squad have forced the cricket lovers to reach the conclusion that the PCB high-ups, selectors and current crop of team management all lack proper cricketing sense,” said The Nation . But then for how long are you going to blame the players, if there is a coach around and that’s where Shoaib Akhtar weighed in with his two bits. And surprisingly he actually made sense. “Pakistan have always been able to produce some of the world’s greatest players. The greatest ones however have not coached the under-19 and the under-16 teams where they can be matured as a batsman,” website Sport360, quoted Shoaib, as saying. “By those ages you should have maturity as a batsman. The best age is 15, if you tell them how to play the game and rotate the strike… that is where real coaching comes into play. I would say that there is a huge gap in that area,” he added.