The PCB is even more disastrous than usual. Here are the numbers to prove it

The on-field reasons behind Pakistan's recent plunge are well-documented, in both white- and red-ball cricket. In a way, though, they are a red herring because the biggest driver for those results is the mess off the field.

Historically the PCB has had a well-earned reputation for dysfunctionality; the (sadly brief) bouts of sound administration are the exceptions not the rule. In its defence, this is not entirely the PCB's doing. The board remains bound to the country's politics. The chairman is effectively appointed by the prime minister and the premiership itself has hardly been a stable post, so… (This, by the way, is the textbook definition of political interference in all textbooks other than the ICC's.)

But even in a rich canon, the instability of the last three years - from the end of August 2021, when Ehsan Mani stepped down as board chairman - stands out. A succession of board heads, nearly a team's worth of head coaches, enough selectors for two XIs to have a game: here, then, are the real numbers behind Pakistan cricket's current malaise.

Four

Chairmen or heads of board since Mani stepped down: Ramiz Raja, Najam Sethi, Zaka Ashraf, and the incumbent, Mohsin Naqvi. It's tempting to see this as a kind of limbo dance line, each successor lower than the last, but once the bar gets this low, it doesn't really matter.

Where would you begin anyway? Ramiz's neutering of Pakistan's pitches was terrible, needless and deliberate. It wasn't worse than his neutering of the executive function of the board, though, bringing in an enfeebled CEO to replace Wasim Khan and, in the process, hoarding all power unto the chair itself.

Sethi took the board backwards, literally, in replacing the 2019 PCB constitution with the 2014 version. This remains a deep wound, taking a board with independent directors and a chairman with curbed powers back to the days when the chairman was the sole decision-maker. Sethi also upended the domestic structure, bringing back departmental cricket, and planted the seeds of the disjointedness seen in the current sides. All in less than six months.

The less said about Ashraf the better, if only because there literally is nothing to be said about his tenure. His only aim was to somehow cling onto the position. He failed.

And now Naqvi. One might think that as the interior minister of Pakistan, maybe, just maybe, he has slightly more important things to deal with than hard-selling the Champions Cup as the panacea to cure Pakistan cricket. What three new tournaments will do that the four existing ones haven't been able to, nobody is clear about, other than bloating the domestic calendar and stretching it to nearly 12 months. Maybe, they hope, that by adding "Champions" to the name, champions will somehow be abracadabra-ed out the other end.

We already know the real winners of these tournaments, though - the five team mentors who don't coach or play (other than two) but who earn a cool PKR 5 million (about US$18,000) a month each. Not only is that more than the coaches and players in these tournaments get, it is also more than any centrally contracted player in Pakistan bar the three in the highest Category A do. It's still not clear what, if anything, their brief is beyond "inspiring" players (this must be the magic bit).