PCB hit pay dirt

The test series in England is over. There is no gainsaying the fact that the PCB hit pay dirt at Lords as well as at the Oval. Yasir Shah, Sami Aslam and Asad Shafiq, to mention a few, were certainly discoveries of the four test-test match series that preceded the ODIs between England and Pakistan cricket team that are now also towards their fag end.
A report says that the PCB has arranged cricket fixture against the West Indies in the UAE in October 2016. It would have been better if the PCB now start arranging home series against foreign teams in Sri Lanka instead of Emirates because the pitches in the UAE are placid and dead offering no help to the bowlers nor do they help the batsmen in any way.
Let us hope that Shahid Afridi, Younas Khan, Hafeez and Misbah ul Haque, Umar Gul and Shoaib Malik would now declare that they are hanging their gloves for good. All of them are now well past their prime and it is about time they call it a day. The PCB had better give them a befitting farewell because they had served Pakistan well for quite a long time. It is about time full concentration be given on the grooming of youngsters with an eye on the next world cup. More opportunities be created for the visit of Pakistani cricketers to the Down Under, South Africa and England till then so that they get the hang of playing on their pitches on different conditions than the one they experience in the sub-continent.
The death of Pakistan’ s legendary opening batsman Hanif Mohammad recently brought to the mind’s eye the players of our team in the Oval’s test match in 1954 that had defeated England on its soil. Most of the members of that team are dead now:Kardar, Fazal Mahmood, Khan Mohammad, Mahmood Hussain, Alimuddin, Maqsood, Shujauddin and Zulfiqar had died long ago. With the passing away of Hanif now, Waqar Hasan, Imtiaz and Wazir Mohammad are probably the only members of that illustrious team who are still alive. It won’t be a bad idea if some TV channel assemble them for a talk show in which they should be asked to reminisce and recollect interesting episodes of that famous Oval test match of 1954 that had established out credentials of Pakistan as a test level cricket team.