Cut away, cut away for four… what an innings, what a player! Take a bow Mohammad Rizwan. The Dutch-Bangla bank series well and truly alive because of one cricketer.”
Pakistan are about to lose a second consecutive series to Bangladesh and be whitewashed in both of them. People think that this is because our team is bad, but what if I was to tell you that this is a deliberate ploy by our team to earn some money quickly.
All this is connected to this one company, Banglawash detergent. We all know that publicity is good for your brand and what could be better publicity than your national cricket team rinsing a formerly great one at home and Banglawashing them, you see when this happens endorphins are released which will associate pleasure with Banglawashing something and so when they see the brand in the shop they will be more inclined to buy it.
This is why the brand has been described (on the very neutral source of it's own website) as the "number one detergent brand in Bangladesh" and also as "having taken the market of Bangladesh by storm with its unique composition and unbeatable performance. Bangla Wash has brought a ray of value for washing clothes to the people of Bangladesh." All this seems innocent and like organic growth and I began to think there was no conspiracy and our team was just crap, but then I saw something shocking on their website.
If you dig deeper into the Banglawash website you find that "the key person behind Banglawash" is Md. Mocaddes Hanif who is "a driving force in the toiletries manufacturing industry in Bangladesh" and also the "CEO of ANH Enterprise Limited". Upon futher inspection ANH has a subcompany called SRD Limited. The only reason anyone would ever have a subcompany, would be to hide something so I had to dig deeper.
The Managing Director of the subcompany was that same Md. Mocaddes Hanif, at this point it was obvious he was doing something shady, but I would soon find out how deep the conspiracy went. It turns out this shady subcomapny was employing current Bangladesh cricketers like Mahmudul Hasan and also Rubel Hossain was on their payroll too. Since employing a Pakistan Cricketer would be way too obvious, they would have to do it through a third party and after looking I believe that the third party is a man called Golam Azam, who must be a relative of Babar Azam.
Why would Babar Azam have links to some random Bangladeshi laundry company, you might ask? Well a few years ago when Babar Azam was Pakistan captain we played in the Banglawash tri-series and won. After a series it is customary that the winning captain will spend a few minutes speaking to the sponsors and I believe that it was at this moment that Banglawash recruited Babar Azam as a sleeper. Futher backing up my point is the fact that Banglawash never sponsored another series before or after this tri series, so it is clear they were just targeting Babar. Banglawash gave Babar Azam shares in the company on the understanding he fails against them causing the brand of Banglawash to become bigger so everyone profits.
Now Babar's performances against Bangladesh start to make sense huh, the fact that he was "injured" for the first test when people said he was fit to play. The fact that he realised he had scored too many runs in the first innings so had to play a loose shot in order to trigger a collapse. The fact that he only scored 64 runs in 4 innings at home against them in the first Banglawash despite the fact he averages 50 in Pakistan. Banglawash has comprimised Pakistan cricket and we must find a way to defeat them.
Pretty much no one in Pakistan cares about Test cricket. The PCB don't, that is for certain, they knew about this series for months and decided to schedule it the week after the PSL meaning our players wouldn't be able to prepare for it. They appointed Azhar Mehmood Test coach previously so that they could fire him quicker once a Test series was over as his contract would expire. Sarfaraz is the current coach but was hardly known for his test exploits and already made a number of blunders, like not selecting Sajid despite the left handers in Bangladesh's team, not playing Khurram and playing a top 5 of left handers leaving us exposed to Mehidy's off spin.
The only man in Pakistan to who test cricket isn't an afterthought in the last 15 years has been Misbah ul Haq. He retired from white ball and still continued to play red ball despite the fact he could have played in leagues. Under his captaincy we went up to number 1 in the rankings and turned the UAE into a fortress. More importantly and recently though when he came back as coach we were starting to go somewhere in Tests, we beat SA in a series for the first time ever (whitewashed them) and we were building a formula for winning tests consistently at home having won all our home series under him, something we have struggled to do so ever since. Away from home we were 3 wickets away from a series win in England. In his brief stint as coach he brought in domestic performers no one knew about like Abid Ali and Noman Ali who performed well for us, as he actually watches domestic cricket. Pretty much all our finds in tests over the last 15 years have been down to Misbah.
I'm not saying he is going to fix the team immediately, but if there is one guy who could fix our test cricket it is most likely to be him. Even technically he worked with Babar in the recent PSL and brought him back to form. If the PCB really don't care about Test match cricket then they should delegate it to the one guy who does.
Azan Awais' innings got me thinking about the Pakistan Junior League again.
The Pakistan Junior League (PJL) was introduced back in 2022 by Ramiz Raja, but was then scrapped after Ramiz was removed by Najam Sethi and co, who said that they would promote home and away junior series in its place (they didn't.) Ramiz said that we needed it to develop talent and give them a pathway to cricket rather than our discovered in the nets by chance method. He also said giving young cricketers access to legends of the game as mentors would also help them develop.
Some of the players from the PJL included: Azan Awais, Shamyl Hussain, Arafat Minhas and Saad Masood who have all gone onto play international cricket for Pakistan. Saad Baig, Ali Raza, Momin Qamar, Farhan Yousuf, Mohammad Zeeshan, Aimal Khan and Shahzaib Khan are all graduates of the PJL of the top of my head who have gone onto play in the PSL, while a few more from the PJL have made it to domestic cricket. Even from an international point of view AM Ghazanfar and Rehan Ahmed both played PJL and are now in their international teams.
On the other hand, the PJL was a financial loss to the PCB and struggled to find sponsors. There is the argument that if it was allowed to run for a few years, as players started to graduate to higher level cricket it would have picked up and started making money. In my opinion it should have been kept, but played on a more lowkey note to save money and to be honest as long as the losses were managable the PCB should have just accepted them as an investment to find talent that could bring us success, which would ultimately increase our sponsorships and tv rights deals and bring that money back in the long term.