Turning around Pakistan cricket will be Mickey Arthur’s toughest test yet

The Australian coach has experience of guiding teams through periods of transition but, for Pakistan, that process is rarely smooth and often brutal.

This file photograph taken on July 24, 2013, shows Mickey Arthur, addressing media representatives following conciliation talks over his dismissal as Australian cricket coach in Sydney. Pakistan has oShow more

Undeniably one way to look at the appointment of Mickey Arthur as the coach of Pakistan is to note that both his previous international tenures came to unhappy conclusions. And then somberly add that Pakistan do happy endings as often as Edgar Allan Poe did happy endings. Nobody wants to be gloomy, probably not even the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). But signing a two-year contract with Arthur with an option to end it after a year betrays the tentativeness of this way of looking; this does not feel like a whole-hearted embrace so much as an awkward, unsure handshake.

A healthier way of looking at it is to recognise that Arthur came to both South Africa and Australia when they were in differing stages of transition. He came out of them with a 50 per cent success rate.

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So Arthur will at least be somewhat familiar with the conditions that greet him at his new workplace, though he is undoubtedly wisened enough to also know that in Pakistan, transitions are not neat bookends on eras. They are like spilt nuclear waste, bleeding and burning through generations past, present and incoming.

He will inherit a Test side that is stable but about to absorb major impact. First it will come up against the unfamiliarity of playing outside Asia, as it has not done in three-and-a-half years. Four Tests in England and three later in Australia – including one day-night – will test that stability to its furthest limits.

Then, at some point during those tours or soon after them, Arthur will face up to the prospect of losing Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan to retirement. That will be not just a loss of runs and experience, but of a culture that binds that side together.

Arthur knows precisely how significant that is because part of his success with South Africa was built on his bond with a senior core of the Test side. He was especially good operating among the shadows cast by men such as Graeme Smith and Mark Boucher.

With Australia, it was not having a senior core for long enough that undid him. Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey were both gone from the Test side earlier than Arthur wanted; Brad Haddin was absent for parts and, in Arthur’s own words, he “lost” Shane Watson. He will lean heavily on both Younis and Misbah early on.

Pakistan’s limited overs sides, though – that is the real trouble. Arthur has enough experience with franchise Twenty20 sides to recognise that Pakistan are playing a kind of cricket at least a decade, if not more, out of date; Arthur has always been one for talking about brands of cricket and changing Pakistan’s white-ball one will be a priority.

He must have glimpsed some of this during the Pakistan Super League (PSL) where he coached Karachi Kings. Sure he saw some talent and skill, but he probably also began to grasp an idea of the scale of their stagnancy in the formats and the deeply embedded malaise of their fielding and fitness.

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Does he have the nous and, importantly, resources to take this on? Naturally he will also want to scope the kind of batting talent in the country and the less bad news is that there are at least options for him to test.

Pakistan’s biggest failing in recent years has been an inability to arrest the regression of their younger batsmen, but also specifically to bring them to a point where they can be properly assessed.

Look beyond Umar Akmal and Ahmed Shehzad, at young men such as Sohaib Maqsood, Haris Sohail, Sami Aslam, Mohammad Rizwan and Babar Azam. The question is not whether they are good enough but that Pakistan, through selectorial follies, are not even close enough to the point at which such assessments can be rationally made.

Arthur likes working individually and at involved levels with players as long-term projects. It might be precisely what some of Pakistan’s younger batsmen need.

Early on in his stint with Australia, he helped David Warner into an especially productive patch with a suggested tweak to his stance; in 2008, with Graeme Smith, he confronted AB de Villiers after a careless dismissal, a frank talk that some view as a turning point in De Villiers’ career.

The Pakistani optimist will see these as pleasing episodes that marry the virtues of a keen technical eye and sensitive man-management. The thing is, though, that Pakistan and Pakistani players, as so many coaches have found, are an entirely different challenge. It will be nothing like Arthur has ever undertaken before.

South Africa and Australia had their own problems, some of them particularly knotty. Pakistan is a different kind of complicated, amplified in this instance by a culture that is completely alien to Arthur. A whiff of it must have come through the woeful campaign with Karachi Kings.

A delicate operational setting will have to be found, somewhere between the overly strict taskmaster who oversaw Homeworkgate and the more – sometimes too – passive regimes he ran at South Africa.

For that, he may also need some smart local staff around him.

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