Babar Azam and Mohammad Yousuf: A Four-Year-Old Technical Question and an Empty Column

Rawalpindi, in the days before the first Test against Sri Lanka. At the pre-series press conference, Babar Azam was asked about Mohammad Yousuf's public advice, posted on X: that Babar should stay away from first-class cricket until his technical shortcomings were corrected, and that if he wanted real remediation he should go and work at an academy in England or Australia. Babar's answer was short and courteous. He had not contacted Yousuf. If Yousuf reached out to him, he would learn from him.

That single sentence contains two numbers. The first is zero: the calls Babar has made. The second is zero: the practice sessions that have been scheduled. And there is a date that appears nowhere in the entire episode — the date by which the technical question will be settled. My hardbound scorebook holds more than two hundred matches, and years ago I taught myself a habit: whenever a player says "I take responsibility," I write a date next to it. At this press conference, there was no date.

The heaviest sentence in Yousuf's post was not about technique. It was this: "I said this four years ago, and nobody listened. Please listen now." Four years. That is the real scoreline of this story, and the original report printed it as a quotation without asking what happened, or did not happen, in those four years.

What the advice actually was, and which format it belonged to

Yousuf's prescription has three parts. One: there are flaws in Babar's technique — a claim, not an opinion. Two: until those flaws are fixed, Babar should stay out of first-class cricket, because domestic red-ball cricket will not correct the flaw and may deepen it. Three: the place for remediation is a specialist academy in England or Australia. And a fourth part that is usually skipped — Yousuf also said Babar remains Pakistan's best player.

That last line sets the tone of the whole argument. It is not a demand to drop a player. It is a demand to save one, from a system that is not saving him.

The format question is decisive here, and the original report never made it clear. This press conference came before a Test series — against Sri Lanka, at Rawalpindi. Red ball, long form, two innings. Yousuf's instruction to pause first-class cricket follows directly from that format logic. In Test cricket a technical flaw is punished in a specific way: repeatedly, in the same pattern, because bowlers can set a field and bowl to a plan across several spells. In white-ball cricket you can leave that ball or take the risk. In a Test, the same ball is still coming on day five.

The consequence is straightforward: a Test technical flaw cannot be measured by T20 form, and cannot be fixed by it either. That is where the public debate has gone wrong. Babar's white-ball standing is constantly conflated with his Test standing. A franchise valuation is not testimony about his Test batting, and his Test average does not reduce his commercial value. These are separate accounts, and this piece will keep them separate.

The setting is information in itself. Technical review happens on the practice ground, in the nets, in the video room, at the batting coach's desk. This review is happening at a press conference — a place where questions are asked and answers given, and nothing is decided.

Two positions, two different systems of argument

The least noticed thing about this dispute is that the two claims are not the same kind of claim.

Yousuf's is a testable technical hypothesis. It has three parts, and all three can be falsified with data: the flaw exists, the flaw is coachable, and domestic red-ball cricket will not fix it. If Babar's dismissals over the last eighteen months turn out to be scattered across modes, Yousuf's claim collapses.

Babar's response is the opposite — a framing that is almost impossible to falsify. He said you can get out in different ways, and it is not necessary that you will always get out in the same pattern. That sounds sensible, professional, emotionally mature. Analytically it is empty, because it declares any data irrelevant before the data arrives.

Test cricket judges batters precisely by the thing Babar dismissed: dismissal-mode clustering. A batter repeatedly caught behind or in the slips off the seam has a technical issue, not bad luck. A batter who is sometimes lbw, sometimes caught at slip, sometimes at mid-on, sometimes run out, has bad form. The treatments are different. Babar's answer erased the distinction.

The one column that would have decided it, and nobody printed it

I should say something from my own shelf here. I learned to write match reports from scorecards, not from press boxes. For years I have copied ball-by-ball logs into a notebook, and when a player is in trouble the first thing I check is whether his dismissals look alike. After reading the report on this dispute, I went looking through my notebooks for Babar's Test dismissals. What I found was incomplete — ball-by-ball for some innings, only a scorecard for others, a newspaper cutting for the rest. My own record is not good enough to answer the question.

That is the central failure of this story. The one dataset that could settle the whole argument does not exist in public. The report gives no Test average, no twelve-to-eighteen-month trend, no dismissal-mode distribution, no home-away split, no separate figures against pace and spin. Without them, Yousuf and Babar are both arguing from rank rather than evidence — one a former great's rank, the other a current star's.

I will not say Yousuf is wrong. I will say nobody was proved right, because the document both men pointed at was never produced. And the day it is produced, we will learn whether the problem was batting or workload and confidence — because the treatments differ completely. If the dismissals really are scattered, then an England academy is the wrong prescription, and the right one is rest, workload management and mental preparation. That is a gap the size of several weeks in an academy versus one week off.

"I said this four years ago, and nobody listened"

If the same technical diagnosis was made four years ago and remains unresolved, the problem is not access to coaching. The problem is that nobody in Pakistan cricket acted on the diagnosis.

Put it plainly: four years ago a former great said this batter has a technical flaw. Four years later the same man is writing the same thing on X, and doing so because he has run out of other routes. In between, no public review appeared, no dedicated batting consultant was appointed whose sole job was this one player's technique, no channel was built through which former players could walk in and talk.

The biggest question in Pakistan cricket right now is not what is wrong with Babar Azam's technique. It is who owns the fixing of it. After this press conference, that question still has no answer.

The choice of channel is itself evidence. Yousuf did not send this to team management, or to the PCB's coaching structure, or into an internal review meeting. He put it on X. When a former great chooses the public platform, he is usually signalling that the internal platform either does not exist, is not trusted, or is politically unusable. Any one of those being true makes this an administrative failure, and a far bigger story than one batter's form.

Rawalpindi is where the flaw will hide, not where it will be caught

One piece of external context, flagged clearly as not part of the source report. Rawalpindi's ground is traditionally regarded in Pakistan's Test circuit as batting-friendly — flat, slow, hard work for seamers from the second day. If it behaves to reputation, this series will not expose the technical flaw. It will cover it.

That is the trap. A fifty on a flat deck is not testimony about technique, and neither is a hundred. If Babar scores well here, the public verdict will be "see, nothing was wrong." The real examination is in the away series, where the ball moves and a bowler sets a field and hits one spot for four overs.

If the ground on which you are testing a flaw is famous for hiding that flaw, you are not testing. You are deferring.

"If he contacts me, I will learn from him"

This is the most quoted and least read sentence of the episode. It has two halves. First: I have not made contact. Second: if he contacts me, I will learn.

The first half is a fact. The second is a condition, and it shifts the burden of initiation onto the man who made the public diagnosis. It is a polite boundary, and privately it may be entirely fair — no star wants to be summoned to remedial work in public, on someone else's terms. There is a status politics here, not only a technical one.

But read as a ledger, it says something plain: as of the date of that press conference, no action is scheduled. No session, no academy placement, no date. One party named a mechanism — overseas academy, specialist coaching, a break from first-class cricket. The other named a feeling — respect, responsibility, willingness to learn. Mechanisms appear in calendars. Feelings appear in press conferences.

"It is my responsibility, not external factors"

Babar also said that when he gets out, the reason is him, not outside circumstances. In the language of captaincy and seniority, that is a good signal. It is right for team culture: a star who takes the hit instead of blaming the pitch, the umpiring or luck does the dressing room a service.

In the language of performance management, it is also something else: acceptance of the status quo. Taking blame and producing a remediation plan are two different jobs. Babar did the first and not the second. "I am responsible" without "I will change this, in this way, by this date" is not accountability. It is courtesy. And courtesy has no calendar.

Selection protectionism: when the place is safe, the fix stops being urgent

One angle nobody raised: is Babar's place in the side so secure that the need to fix anything has quietly disappeared?

It sounds harsh. It is a structural question. A player whose spot is settled every series, whose captaincy or star status persists independently of output, has less reason to believe anything must change. And a coach or selector who wants to say something to that player has less reason to take the risk.

This is exactly where the public route becomes rational for former players. When the internal system bends to star status, the public system is all that is left. And the public system carries no responsibility. It only makes noise.

The other side: Yousuf may be wrong

The least-said thing in this debate. Yousuf's advice is not infallible. It rests on a diagnosis nobody has publicly evidenced. If Babar's dismissals genuinely vary — slip one day, lbw the next, caught at deep square the next, run out the next — then this is not a technical flaw but a form cycle. And a form cycle is treated with workload and mind, not with an academy in England.

Second, the England-or-Australia prescription is itself a statement: that Pakistan's domestic coaching ecosystem cannot teach red-ball specifics, or cannot challenge a star. In Pakistani cricket discourse this is an emotional point, routinely converted into a question of national pride. For me it is a capability assessment, not an emotional one — and if a former great believes the domestic system cannot do the job, that opinion should be on the record however uncomfortable it is.

Third, the advice collides with calendar reality. A marquee player's weeks do not belong only to cricket. They belong to broadcasters, franchises and board revenue. A multi-week overseas academy residency is a commitment this system was never built to grant. The advice can be technically correct and institutionally impossible at the same time.

The biggest distortion: white-ball reputation applied to red-ball standing

Babar Azam is an established name in the world's largest T20 markets, and that fact is entirely separate from his Test standing. In public argument the two keep substituting for each other. An ODI hundred buries the Test question. A cheap Test dismissal puts his whole cricketing identity on trial. Both reactions are wrong.

The practical effect is that every innings in this series will be read through the lens of the dispute. A good score becomes proof that nothing was wrong. A bad one becomes proof that Yousuf was right. Neither conclusion will be connected to technical change, because technical change does not show up in a single innings. The series will become noise around an argument that gets settled on a television panel rather than on the field.

What to watch

The first thing I will watch is not the Rawalpindi scorecard. It is the mode of dismissal in the away series — and this time I will write it down properly, ball, line, length, field position, so that the next time this argument comes round there is paper. If the same pattern repeats there, Yousuf is vindicated and four years of ignored advice becomes a heavy stain. If the modes scatter, the real question was workload, and an England academy would be a detour rather than a cure.

The second thing is how long it takes the PCB to create a role with a named owner — for the technical remediation of the national team's top-order batters. If that role does not exist by the next series, Yousuf's "nobody listened" will still be true in year five, and this will stop being a story about a bat and become a story about scaffolding.

The third, and the one that matters, is whether a date gets attached to any of it. A session, a review, an appointment, a beginning. Because if none does, another former player will write the same thing in four years, and we will read the same article again. The page in the scorebook is still blank where it should say what was finally decided.