Too much media hype can be disastrous

Too much media hype can be disastrous

By Zakir Hussain Syed

The pakistan Under-19 cricket team have returned home after the poorest ever performance by any Pakistan team in the history of this event. I realise and understand that victory and defeat are part of all sports and one should take them in their stride but if the performance is below even the worst expectations, it is time to look into realities of such disappointments. The Pakistan U-19 team were managed by Haroon Rashid, a former Test cricketer and now a full time employee of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), with Sabih Azhar of Islamabad Cricket Association as the coach.

There was lot of publicity before the departure as to how the team had prepared for this event. This team were sent well in advance of the tournament to ‘acclimatise.’ Their victory against their Australian counterparts in a three-match practice series before the actual event was projected as if half the battle had already been won.

I just could not rationalize projection of the team members praying or fasting. They are Muslims and there is nothing extraordinary in what they were doing. The Pakistan hockey teams and players, right from the days of Brig Hamidi, have always been very particular about their prayers but this religious duty by hockey stars was never publicized.

A victory at the start of the tournament was made to look a big achievement with special praise for coach Sabih Azhar. However, the biggest claim from coach Sabih Azhar came before the match against their Indian counterparts just before EID when he said that the team would give the nation a ‘good news’ obviously implying that their victory against the Indians was almost guaranteed! This did not happen and thus the ‘good news’ never materialized. In fact the defeat against India was the beginning of an unprecedented downhill slide in which the Pakistan U-19 squad ended up in their worst and lowest ever position in this event since its inception.

Sports events and teams invariably get decent publicity in the press but what was the need to carry a non stop projection of the team and coaches! It certainly has backfired. This is precisely what happened when the proposed home series against Bangladesh was constantly given non stop projection. I was the only one to sound a word of caution at that time saying that a three or four days visit was never going to be an earth shattering event and should therefore not be projected the way it was being done. The proposed tour was then canceled on a flimsy pretext thereby causing immense disappointment.

There have been newspaper stories about U-19 team management dictating strategy from outside including instructions to let fast bowlers bowl all their overs during the middle of the innings against India and also field placing suggestions. The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) must look into all these stories and get to the root cause of this debacle. In any case full time employees of PCB should never be sent as coaches and managers simply because in case of their failure, their very credibility and competence becomes questionable. Let Haroon Rashid and Sabih Azhar submit their tour report and then a committee, preferably headed by Javed Miandad, hold an in depth meeting with the team management to find out what exactly went wrong. It is only when failures are analyzed scientifically that future improvements can be ensured.

(Zakir Hussain Syed is Pakistan’s internationally renowned sports administrator, sports broadcaster and sports analyst)