Pakistan’s current Test captain, Shan Masood, has candidly highlighted the significant gap between his country’s Test team and the top-tier cricketing nations. In a recent interview, Masood attributed this disparity primarily to the inconsistent scheduling of Test matches for Pakistan.
The impact of inconsistent scheduling
Masood emphasized that the erratic nature of Pakistan’s Test calendar has hindered the team’s progress. Unlike the ‘big three’ – India, Australia, and England – who enjoy consistent Test match schedules, Pakistan faces long breaks between series. This inconsistency, according to Masood, prevents the team from building momentum and gaining the necessary experience to compete at the highest level.
“We need more Test cricket. We play a lot of domestic cricket, so I don’t think we can blame that. We do play ten first-class matches minimum, and with the introduction of departmental cricket, some players ended up playing 16-17 first-class matches in a year. For me, it’s more about how we can get our team to play more Test matches. That comes down to scheduling, reducing the gaps, and ensuring we have consistent Test squads going forward,” said Masood on the PCB podcast.
“We’re playing nine Test matches in four months, but we’ve also had to deal with an unfortunate calendar where we played in Australia, and then we’re playing our next Test after ten months. These are challenges that Pakistan cricket needs to address going forward,” he added.
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The need for more home Test matches
Despite playing Test cricket at home since 2019, Pakistan has struggled to establish a dominant record in their own conditions. Masood believes that while the team has played a considerable amount of domestic cricket, the lack of consistent international matches has prevented them from developing a clear home strategy. He stressed the importance of identifying an ideal approach for batting, bowling, and overall gameplay on home soil.
“In Test cricket, which is the ultimate challenge in the game, you have to be familiar with certain conditions. Yes, we’ve been playing at home since 2019, but other teams have been playing on their home soils for much longer. We still have to decide what our best approach at home is. If I’m being brutally honest, in home Test matches, because they’ve been played at different times of the year and against different nations, we still haven’t found our ideal way of playing at home that suits our batting, bowling, and overall style. That’s something we need to quickly figure out. We need to determine what helps us win as a team. How can we create conditions that suit us more and put us in the driving seat, rather than just thinking about how we can cope with the opposition,?” Masood added further.
