Pakistan’s Test captain, Shan Masood, wants the country to play more Test matches as they get ready for a rare and busy season of red-ball cricket. This season begins with a two-match series against Bangladesh in Rawalpindi on August 21.
Pakistan plans to play seven Test matches at home, taking on teams like Bangladesh, England, and the West Indies. They will also play a two-Test series in South Africa. The last time Pakistan played more than six Test matches in one season was over 25 years ago, in the 1998-99 season.
The matches against Bangladesh will be the first since the New Year’s Test in Sydney earlier this year. After this home season ends in January 2025, Pakistan will have a long break with no Test cricket planned until October 2025, when South Africa comes to visit, followed by another long break until March 2026.
On the PCB podcast, Masood, along with Test coach Jason Gillespie and former cricketer and broadcaster Bazid Khan, stressed the importance of having more regular Test cricket for Pakistan.
“We need more Test cricket,” Masood stated. “For me, it’s about finding ways to schedule more Test matches for our team. This involves shortening the breaks between games and making sure we have a stable group of players for future Test series. We’re currently playing nine Test matches over four months, but we’ve also faced a difficult schedule where we played in Australia and then had to wait ten months for our next Test. These are issues that Pakistan cricket must tackle in the future.”
“To be frank, in home Test matches, because they’ve been played at various times of the year and against different countries, we haven’t yet figured out the best approach for our team that works well with our batting, bowling, and overall strategy,” the captain further explained.
Masood is worried about more than just the number of Test matches Pakistan plays. He thinks Pakistan hasn’t yet created a strong identity in Test matches played at home. When Test cricket came back to Pakistan in 2019, the team started off with good results at home. But since they beat South Africa in January 2021, Pakistan hasn’t won any Test matches in three home series, including being completely defeated by England and tying with New Zealand.
Masood said, “In Test cricket, which is the hardest challenge in the game, you need to know the conditions well. Yes, we’ve been playing at home since 2019, but other teams have been playing on their own fields for much longer. We still need to figure out the best way to play at home.”
One important goal for Pakistan in the upcoming series against Bangladesh is to create a stronger home advantage. The Test team for this series has many fast bowlers, with only one special spinner, Abrar Ahmed, included.
This approach to choosing players reminds us of when Test cricket came back to Pakistan, and the team used fast bowling to beat teams like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. But in later matches against Australia, England, and New Zealand, where spin bowling was more important, Pakistan had a hard time.
Masood knows what they need to do: “We need to figure out what makes us win as a team. How can we make situations better for us and give us control, instead of just trying to deal with the other team?”
With a lot of Test matches coming up, taking care of the players’ health is very important. Important players like Babar Azam, Mohammad Rizwan, Shaheen Shah Afridi, and Naseem Shah were not allowed to play in other countries’ leagues, because the main goal is for them to play for Pakistan.
