Pakistan's opener rotation schedule comes full circle

Salman Butt has just been named as one of Pakistan's World Cup reserves! Which means an another complete cycle and run-through for our young openers is close to completion. Many critics claim that the PCB really has no long term or short term plans or strategies, but one has got to admire the consistency in our opener rotation.

I may be wrong, but this is the pecking order. Salman Butt starts off. Once Butt fails, Taufeeq Umar is slated to be next. Mohammad Hafeez, is around here, though its uncertain whether he comes after Umar or before Farhat. Anyway, Imran Farhat the bandana toting, catch-dropping bastard comes next. Imran Nazir, the young dashing aggressive opener from Peshawar or somewhere around there, comes in dead last. Now these are the openers on the rotation schedule. Yasir Hameed is an opener too, plays like an opener, and also looks like Imran Nazir crossbreed with Taufeeq Umar. Anyway, he is an opener, but somehow he has been placed into the middle order rotation schedule. (That's a lot slower as may be expected)

On occasion, the selectors and management will plug in Shoaib Malik, Kamran Akmal, Shahid Afridi as openers too. These 3 players are permanent members of the squad, so they are not on the rotation schedule. They are only fit into that opening slot on a temporary/hopeful basis during the transition period. But rest assured, they WILL fail too, so the integrity, frequency and time period of the rotation remains.

In SL last year (March 2006), we had Salman Butt, Kamran Akmal, Shoaib Malik and Imran Farhat as our openers in either test or ODI.

Note: The opener rotation schedule is not biased towards the format of the game. It is speculated that since our openers never cross 60 in either format of the game, and will always aim for a strike rate of over 150 anyway, using them in both formats is sound thinking! As a result, we do not employ specialist test or ODI openers.

In Eng (Summer 2006), It was Salman and Farhat again, but Butt starting doing badly, so Akmal came into open. Kamran Akmal is pretty bad opener. He deserves his own post. So then Mohammad Hafeez came in, scored his 50, which is a tradition for any Pakistani opener who has been out of the side for a while). He failed eventually (a bit sooner than expected), so they got in Taufeeq.

Then WI came to us. Taufeeq was dropped since he played much better in 'ICC Cricket Captain 2005' than in real life. We stuck with Farhat and Hafeeez. Blah blah.

Then we went to SA. Enter Imran Nazir. Bye bye Farhat.

There we have it. So its all just a gamble. Imran Nazir, who 6 months ago was nowhere near being our World Cup opener, is now destined to play the entire tournament. Isn't that amazing? At least its a fair system.

I wonder how I can scribble my name as a possible opener. I'd like to go in right after Farhat, but before Nazir, in the schedule. The reason being, prominent scientists have shown that public expectation in the openers is lowest right after Farhat fails.