Yousuf's Devastating Theory: Beating India in 2021 Was the Worst Thing to Happen to Pakistan

October 24, 2021. Dubai International Stadium. Shaheen Shah Afridi's opening spell rips through India's top order. Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan chase 152 without losing a wicket. Ten wickets in hand. The first Pakistan victory over India in a World Cup. Commentary boxes erupt. Twitter crashes. An entire country exhales.

Four years and eleven months later, that night looks different. Not because the cricket was any less magnificent — it was — but because of what it apparently did to the people who played it.

Mohammad Yousuf, one of Pakistan's greatest batters, has offered what might be the most counter-intuitive explanation for his country's cricketing collapse. Speaking to Samaa TV this week, the man who once averaged 99.33 in a calendar year traced every fracture — every sacked coach, every captaincy coup, every mid-series squad purge — back to that one evening in the desert.

Yousuf's argument is simple, brutal, and deeply uncomfortable: Pakistan's greatest modern moment became Pakistan's worst modern curse. The 10-wicket win didn't just beat India — it convinced a generation of Pakistan cricketers that they had arrived. That they were untouchable. That the hard work was done.

What followed was not the era of dominance that a victory of that magnitude should have launched. It was the opposite. Players stopped being hungry and started being entitled. The dressing room stopped being about the team and started being about who would lead it.

The captaincy carousel Yousuf describes isn't metaphor — it's arithmetic. Since that Dubai night, Pakistan have cycled through five Test captains: Babar Azam, Shaheen Shah Afridi (briefly), Shan Masood, Mohammad Rizwan, and now whoever emerges from the wreckage of the Edgbaston squad announcement. The T20I captaincy has been even more volatile.

The Babar-Shaheen rift — which CricIntel's Basit Ali piece detailed earlier this month — now reads less like a personality clash and more like the inevitable consequence of what Yousuf describes. When everyone believes they deserve the armband, the room splits. When the room splits, the cricket dies.

And the cricket has died. Pakistan's Test record now stands at 153 wins and 154 defeats — the first time since 1987 that the loss column has exceeded the win column. They've just been swept 2-0 in England, had seven players and two coaches axed mid-tour, and face a dead-rubber third Test at Edgbaston with five uncapped players in the squad.

What makes Yousuf's diagnosis cut deeper than the usual post-mortem is that he's not blaming individuals. He's blaming a collective mindset shift — the moment humility left the dressing room and entitlement walked in.

This isn't a new phenomenon in sport. The 'curse of early success' has undone teams across every code — from Leicester City's post-title implosion to Australia's post-2003 World Cup complacency. But Pakistan's version is uniquely destructive because the success was so singular. It wasn't a tournament win or a series victory. It was one match. One evening. One chase.

And that, perhaps, is Yousuf's sharpest point. Pakistan didn't win the 2021 T20 World Cup — they lost in the semi-final to Australia. They won one match against India and treated it like a coronation. The actual tournament achievement was a semi-final exit. But the dressing room memory was the 10-wicket annihilation of their greatest rivals, and that memory was enough to convince players they were world-beaters.

They weren't. They were a team that had a great night. And the difference between a great night and a great era is five years of what came next: no ICC trophy, no consistency, no accountability, and — as of this England tour — no coherent squad.

Yousuf's comments didn't land in a vacuum. On the same day, Mushtaq Ahmed — Pakistan's legendary spin bowling coach — told the BBC Stumped Podcast that he would be proud to coach Pakistan but is genuinely frightened by how the PCB treats its own people. Meanwhile, Misbah-ul-Haq, the recently departed selector, called the PCB's revolving-door reforms 'cosmetic surgery' and alleged that local coaches face harsher treatment than foreign ones.

Three former Pakistan cricketers. Three separate platforms. One unanimous verdict: the system is broken, and it has been since October 2021.

The 3rd Test at Edgbaston begins on September 9. Pakistan's squad contains five uncapped players, a new coaching setup (Hesson and Noffke replacing Sarfaraz and Gul), and the heavy knowledge that even a win cannot undo a series already lost. Somewhere in Dubai, the floodlights from that October night are still on. Pakistan cricket has been stumbling in their glare ever since.