The Day Pakistan Was Ruined: Basit Ali Names the Babar-Shaheen Rift as Ground Zero

Pakistan cricket has spent the last three years lurching from one crisis to the next — captaincy changes, coaching sackings, mid-series squad overhauls, historic defeats — and the explanations have always been structural. Bad selectors. Bad administrators. Bad luck. But on the 'Game Plan' show this week, former Pakistan batter Basit Ali offered a different diagnosis. A simpler one. And a far more damaging one.

The root cause, Basit said, isn't the PCB's revolving door of coaches or the selectors' inability to pick a consistent XI. It's a personal rift between Babar Azam and Shaheen Shah Afridi — Pakistan's two best players — that has poisoned everything around it since the captaincy was first taken from Babar and handed to Shaheen in late 2023.

To understand what Basit is talking about, you need the timeline. And the timeline is genuinely absurd.

November 2023: Babar Azam resigns as all-format captain after a disastrous World Cup campaign. The PCB hands the T20I captaincy to Shaheen Afridi and the Test captaincy to Shan Masood. January 2024: Shaheen's first T20I assignment — Pakistan lose to New Zealand 4-1. March 2024: The PCB strips Shaheen of the white-ball captaincy after one series and reinstates Babar. Shaheen's tenure lasted exactly four months.

Mid-2024: Babar resigns again after a poor T20 World Cup. Mohammad Rizwan takes over. Rizwan wins zero of his four matches. Then Salman Ali Agha gets the T20I captaincy. Shaheen is quietly handed back the ODI leadership. By mid-2026, Pakistan has three different captains across three formats — Babar in Tests, Shaheen in ODIs, Salman in T20Is — a split captaincy structure that looks less like strategy and more like the only arrangement that keeps two feuding stars from having to answer the same question.

Basit Ali's point isn't just that two players fell out. It's that the fallout between Pakistan's talisman batter and their strike bowler created factions in the dressing room that no amount of coaching reshuffles can fix. When your two best players can't coexist under one leadership structure, the damage radiates outward.

Pakistan arrived in England this summer already fractured. Babar was on his third stint as Test captain. Shaheen had been dropped from the Test squad entirely — told to focus on white-ball cricket. The team lost the first Test at Headingley inside three days, then the second at Lord's by 194 runs. Pakistan's Test losses now outnumber their wins for the first time since 1987.

The PCB's response was characteristically nuclear: seven players sent home, head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul sacked, five uncapped players called up, and Mike Hesson and Ashley Noffke parachuted in for the third Test at Edgbaston. Misbah-ul-Haq resigned from the selection committee after being bypassed on the overhaul. Shahid Afridi called it the most shocking selection decision he'd ever seen.

When the scale of the overhaul became public, Kevin Pietersen — who has positioned himself as Babar's friend and supporter — delivered the kind of mockery that only stings because it's accurate.

Perhaps the most telling detail in this entire saga is Shaheen Afridi's response when asked about his ODI captaincy amid reports that Babar was being considered for all-format leadership again. The qualifier in his answer said more than any press conference could.

"Abhi tak toh main hee captain hoon" — I'm the captain for now — he said with a smirk. Not "I am the captain." Not "I'm committed to leading this side." For now. A man who knows the revolving door could spin again at any moment, because it has spun before, and because the rift that started it all has never been resolved.

Mickey Arthur, who coached Pakistan to the number-one Test ranking and the 2017 Champions Trophy, watched all of this and reached a conclusion that Basit Ali would recognise.

Basit Ali named the wound. Shahid Afridi described the symptoms. Pietersen laughed at the absurdity. Arthur demanded stability. And yet nothing will change before the third Test at Edgbaston on September 9, because nothing can change — the rift between Babar and Shaheen isn't a selection problem or a coaching problem. It's a human problem, and the PCB has shown zero capacity to address those.

Pakistan's two best cricketers of this generation fell out over who should lead the team. Instead of mediating, the board lurched between them — giving one the job, taking it away, giving it back, splitting the formats, dropping one from the other's squad — until the dressing room calcified into camps and the results became unsalvageable.

Five captains. Four coaches. Seven players axed mid-tour. And at the centre of all of it, a rift that everyone in Pakistan cricket knew about but nobody wanted to name out loud. Until Basit Ali sat in front of a camera and said what the numbers had been screaming for three years: Pakistan was ruined that day.