Former Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ramiz Raja has passed the buck on to then-captain Babar Azam for the underwhelming home pitches in Pakistan during his tenure; he had defended the surfaces earlier.
Raja said, during a BBC Test Match Special, or TMS, broadcast during the second Test between Pakistan and England in Multan that Babar had been integral to the pitch-related decisions-a major climbdown from Raja’s previous public statements where he defended the state of the pitches as being part of a bigger plan against Australia in 2022.
In an interview, Raja pointed at Babar as the central figure in laying out the pitch strategy in their series with Australia. “I wasn’t really bossing the pitch preparation,” Raja said.
“I was only listening to Babar. When he’d walk into my room, I’d ask him what he had planned and how he was going to beat Australia. He came up with the game plan, and at times, I did argue, but he’s the captain at the end of the day,” he added.
When you don’t know the nature of a pitch, it just becomes a guessing game. If the pitch is not going to behave properly or to your liking and to your strength, you cannot plan really for an assault. And that’s been the major reason, a major cause for Pakistan’s debacle at home. The pitches have not really responded to the kind of talent that you picked to perform,” Ramiz said.
These comments seem a climbdown from Raja, who, as PCB chairman, was often seen as the driving force behind the decisions that found all of Pakistan’s pitches under the scanner from the international community for being overly flat and dead. The first Test against Australia, in Rawalpindi, was a high-scoring draw with just 14 wickets falling over the five days.
Steve Smith of Australia had, then, termed the wicket “dead and benign” during one of the interactions with media. However, Raja had earlier defended the pitch strategy, claiming that it was prepared to protect the so called limited resources of Pakistan against the powerful bowling attack of Australia.
