PCB in the hunt of a coach for their players!!! Don’t they need a coach or coaches are not interested to work with Pakistani Team.
Its been more than two months since the death of Bob Woolmer, Pakistan is living with a coach for its cricket team. Bob Woolmer was hired as coach for Pakistan cricket team about three years ago when Pakistan was badly defeated by India at home grounds. He was second foreigner coach with PCB after Richard who had to leave the team after 2003 world cup. Bob was gentle man and renowned coach over the world. He had worked with South African team before coming to Pakistan and it was his efforts that had made South African Team a balanced and fighting team. Bob had taken some crucial actions in Pakistan like bringing Shoaib Malik up the batting order and shaping him as a batsman. In his tenure with Pakistan team, players had been united under captain-ship of Inzamam-ul-Haq and always showed team work. One thing Bob failed to do was establishment of opening pair for Pakistan.
Now at this time Pakistan is playing without a coach and there are a lot of opinions and sayings about the position of coach. It has been heard that many international coaches have approached PCB for this position. Also there are some legendary players who have shown some interest in coaching the team. One major aspect is the debate about the foreign or local coach. There is a group of people including fans, media, and so on who want to have local coach and they plea that a local coach can understand the needs of players according to environment and there is no problem of language as well if PCB hires a local coach. They argue that the team members are not able to speak and understand English that much and there is always a language barrier if there is a foreign coach.
Also some objections on a foreign coach, at least Bob did so, is that in free days they tend to go back to their families living back in their homelands. While coaching job needs to make players practice and remove their mistakes while the cricket season is off. These problems can’t be solved in a matter of one or two days camp and there is never much time during a tournament. But we have experienced a lot of coaches in past who were from Pakistan but they always fell victim to grouping. A local person has both good and bad relations with certain players and these things always make the team scattered. To avoid such a thing, Selection Committee must be strengthened.
Now at this stage PCB has collected the CV’s of many coaches for this post. According to an official of PCB there is a shot listed stack of 5 names with PCB and PCB has decided to shrink this list to 3 and then PCB will call those three to appear before an interviewing panel. PCB official has denied to name any of the person including the list.
Team is also giving its own views about the need of coach. Like Shahid Afridi said to media some days ago that the team is comprising of senior and mature members mostly and they do not need a full time professional coach. Muhammad Yousaf on the other hand said that Afridi has his own right of opinion and he feels that there must be a coach to properly guide the players. Yousaf praised the Shoaib Malik’s behaviour as captain and told that he always does dialog and gets advices from other and senior players and is a good choice to be a captain.