One hopes PCB (Pakistan Cricket Board) has a more comprehensive plan for raising the game’s standard than just showing the captain the door. Ex-captain now, wicket-keeper Sarfaraz Ahmand must have known that the axe was coming. But to boot him from T20 captaincy as well, despite the poor showing against Sri Lanka, shows poor taste as well as poor judgment. Surely it would have been better to let him concentrate on the shortest version of the game, not least because he captained the team to an unprecedented back-to-back 11 series wins as well as the ICC number one ranking. And, with more international cricket due shortly Down Under, where our players struggled to adapt to fast, bouncy pitches even in the golden days of Pakistan cricket, what if just toggling the captaincy does not do the job and the team scores yet more losses? Simply changing the coach/selector hasn’t done much so far, but maybe the new setup at the Board has a magic formula to deal with just such a fallout. One hoped that one of the things that would certainly get high-level attention during Prime Minister Imran Khan’s time would be cricket. Yet so far the only thing his team at the Board has done is disband departmental cricket; effectively shutting the system that produced all the cricketing greats in our history. There was never any real structural upgradation of the Board and, from the looks of things, it doesn’t seem as if one is likely anytime soon. As a result, we have continued to rely on individual performers and performances to win matches and series. Other teams, meanwhile, not only made their boards more efficient and transparent, but also embraced scientific training of players and teams. And as the flow of our natural talent receded, we were reduced to a second- sometimes third-rate outfit. No better example than India about the benefits of adopting a professional approach. They freed their Board from all sorts of political influence and interference. Then they strengthened, not fiddled with, their domestic structure. And then they imported all sorts of scientific advances that other more progressive Boards were incorporating. All the while PCB was a theatre of musical chairs between political appointees who in turn stuffed it with their own people and also disturbed the composition of the team. The management now needs to come up with a comprehensive plan that will address these crucial issues, especially the future of domestic players in an environment where they do not have the departmental cover to meet financial needs. They will run out of options very soon if all they have is firing the captain after a bad run. *