KARACHI, 29 February 2008 — Pakistani cricket officials are convinced they need to revert to pitch doctors from abroad after their home-grown curators let them down last year by failing to implement a project aimed at laying down sporting wickets throughout the country last year.
The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) is in the process of identifying experienced curators in several Test-playing nations of the world but is most likely to single out a groundsman from Down Under for the assignment of Pakistan’s head curator later this year.
Some years back, Englishman Andy Atkinson was hired by the PCB to prepare wickets for international matches but later the board decided to keep faith in local curators.
However, PCB officials were left frustrated last year when their team of local curators was unable to deliver several dozen ‘bouncy’ pitches for Pakistan’s first-class grounds due to what senior board officials term as ‘sheer incompetence’.
Pakistan’s head curator Agha Zahid, a former Test cricketer, was assigned with the job to lay 90 wickets in several grounds all over the country by October last year in a bid to allow hundreds of Test, international and domestic cricketers to train and play on more challenging surfaces.
But the project failed to take off and later Pakistan’s domestic season was mostly played on placid wickets and was criticized for its failure to produce competitive cricket.
Shafqat Naghmi, PCB’s Chief Operating Officer, told Arab News that the board has learned its lesson from its previous failure and is now looking beyond the locally available curators to implement its pitch project this year.
“We cannot allow the likes of Agha Zahid to let us down again because of their sheer incompetence,” he stressed. “We are trying to identify a seasoned curator, who can come to Pakistan on a full-time basis and help us improve the quality of our wickets,” he added.
Naghmi said that the PCB has also garnered the support of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) to rope in a specialist from New Zealand.
“The ACC has a deal with some institute in New Zealand that specializes in preparations of cricket pitches,” he said. “We have asked some ACC officials to help us out in hiring the best man for our job.”
The PCB official said that efforts are also being made to single out curators in Australia, which he believes has some of the best specialists in the world when it comes to preparing good pitches.
Naghmi was instrumental in chalking out blueprint for laying down sporting wickets in Pakistan last year. The project was aimed at preparing batsmen who are equally comfortable batting on fast and bouncy tracks as they are on friendlier pitches.
The board had earlier singled out their batsmen’s inability to cope with pace and bounce as chief reasons behind Pakistan’s less than impressive track record abroad in recent years. Its officials had reached the conclusion that the basic reason behind it is that Pakistan lacks quality pitches that offer much bounce or pace and the batsmen are too used to playing on placid pitches.
The PCB planned to have nine pitches each in 10 cricket grounds of the country. The pitches were to be laid in grounds in cities like Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad and Quetta.
Visiting teams have generally complained about the poor quality of Pakistan wickets in the past. In response, Pakistan have normally promised ‘competitive pitches’ for their home matches.
Naghmi said that the purpose of having sporting wickets in the country is not to please visiting teams. “It’s in our own interest to improve our wickets because it’s difficult to produce world class cricketers on the sort of surfaces we have here.”
