Pakistan cricket in a ‘very disappointing place,’ says ex-team director Mickey Arthur
Pakistan cricket in a ‘very disappointing place,’ says ex-team director Mickey Arthur/node/2452321/pakistan
Pakistan cricket in a ‘very disappointing place,’ says ex-team director Mickey Arthur
Pakistan’s ex-captain Babar Azam (R) talks with former team director Mickey Arthur during a practice session at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, India, on October 13, 2023. (AFP/File)
ISLAMABAD: Former Pakistan cricket team director Mickey Arthur said on Thursday that the country’s cricket was in a “very disappointing place,” saying that the lack of support extended to talented players makes them underperform.
Arthur was appointed team director by former Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chairman Najam Sethi in April 2023. The South African coach did not spend a large amount of time with the team physically due to his contract with English county team Derbyshire, earning the ire of cricket fans and critics alike. The former Pakistan coach, however, joined the team part-way through the Asia Cup, and was with Pakistan’s squad for the entirety of their World Cup campaign in November.
After the national team’s disappointing performance in the 50-over World Cup in India, Pakistan appointed former cricketer Mohammad Hafeez as the team’s director and head coach. Meanwhile, head coach Grant Bradburn and Arthur were initially reassigned before a new team management was brought in.
In an exclusive interview with cricket website ESPNcricinfo, Arthur said he still follows Pakistan cricket but the passion he had for it “waned a little bit” after he was sacked.
“To be brutally honest, I think Pakistan cricket is in a very disappointing place,” he said. “There’s a massive amount of talent there, there are some world-class players, not just talented players. They’re not given the support structure that they need to flourish.”
Pakistan followed up its disappointing stint in the 50-over World Cup with hapless performances in its recently concluded tour of Australia and New Zealand. During the three-match Test series, the South Asian team lost 3-0 to Australia. Against New Zealand, the green shirts, led by new captain Shaheen Shah Afridi, lost 4-1 in a five-match T20I series.
The South African coach said that in 2017 when Pakistan won the Champions Trophy under former skipper Sarfaraz Ahmed, and till 2019 when he was the team’s coach, he helped create an environment where the cricketers were made to work hard but received his full support. Arthur said as a result, the cricketers played for the team rather than their individual selves.
“When there’s security within the environment, Pakistan is very good. When there’s that insecurity, players start playing for themselves instead of the team because they’re thinking of the next tour, and the next contract,” he said.
“That’s a dangerous place to be in, and that’s kind of where Pakistan cricket is now. And that’s something that’s very disappointing and sad for me.”
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s national airline has launched special flights to Iraq’s Najaf city to provide a seamless travel experience to pilgrims during the Islamic month of Muharram, state broadcaster Radio Pakistan reported on Sunday.
Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala hold tremendous significance for Shia Muslims around the world, many of whom travel to these cities during the first two months of Islamic lunar calendar to recall the sacrifices made by Imam Hussain, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
“Pakistan International Airlines has launched special flights for Najaf to facilitate pilgrims during Muharram,” Radio Pakistan said in a report. “The flights operation called ‘Operation Ashura’ is designed to provide a seamless travel experience for pilgrims during this significant period of religious observance.”
The state broadcaster said return flights from Najaf will begin on July 20.
Pakistan’s central moon-sighting committee met on Saturday in the southwestern city of Quetta to spot the Muharram crescent. The Ruet-e-Hilal Committee (RHC) announced that Pakistan would observe the first of Muharram on July 8 while Ashura, which marks the martyrdom of Hussian, would be observed on July 17.
Ashura, which falls on Muharram 10 every year, sees hundreds of thousands of Shia Muslims take part in religious gatherings and processions in Pakistan to mourn Hussain’s passing. These processions and gatherings take place amid tight security, as militant groups in Pakistan have often targeted them in the past and killed of hundreds of people.
Pakistan’s largest Punjab province has proposed a ban on all social media platforms from Muharram 6-11 to ensure proper security measures, provincial information minister Azma Bukhari said on Friday.
The measure was aimed at protecting Shia Muslims from sectarian violence and control the spread of hate speech and misinformation, the provincial government wrote in a letter to Pakistan’s interior ministry last week.
Thousands in Pakistan treated for heat stroke last month as June breaks global record
Last month was hottest June on record, exacerbating fears 2024 could be warmest year on record
Most of the heat is from long-term warming from greenhouse gases, say scientists and meteorologists
Updated 10 min 42 sec ago
AP
Earth’s more than year-long streak of record-shattering hot months kept on simmering through June, according to the European climate service Copernicus.
There’s hope that the planet will soon see an end to the record-setting part of the heat streak, but not the climate chaos that has come with it, scientists said.
The global temperature in June was record warm for the 13th straight month and it marked the 12th straight month that the world was 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times, Copernicus said in an early Monday announcement.
“It’s a stark warning that we are getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris Agreement,” Copernicus senior climate scientist Nicolas Julien said in an interview. “The global temperature continues to increase. It has at a rapid pace.”
That 1.5 degree temperature mark is important because that’s the warming limit nearly all the countries in the world agreed upon in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, though Julien and other meteorologists have said the threshold won’t be crossed until there’s long-term duration of the extended heat — as much as 20 or 30 years.
“This is more than a statistical oddity and it highlights a continuing shift in our climate,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.
The globe for June 2024 averaged 62 degrees Fahrenheit (16.66 degrees Celsius), which is 1.2 degrees (0.67 Celsius) above the 30-year average for the month, according to Copernicus. It broke the record for hottest June, set a year earlier, by a quarter of a degree (0.14 degrees Celsius) and is the third-hottest of any month recorded in Copernicus records, which goes back to 1940, behind only last July and last August.
It’s not that records are being broken monthly but they are being “shattered by very substantial margins over the past 13 months,” Julien said.
“How bad is this?” asked Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler, who wasn’t part of the report. “For the rich and for right now, it’s an expensive inconvenience. For the poor it’s suffering. In the future the amount of wealth you have to have to merely be inconvenienced will increase until most people are suffering.”
Even without hitting the long-term 1.5-degree threshold, “we have seen the consequences of climate change, these extreme climate events,” Julien said — meaning worsening floods, storms, droughts and heat waves.
June’s heat hit extra hard in southeast Europe, Turkiye, eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa and western Antarctica, according to Copernicus. Doctors had to treat thousands of heatstroke victims in Pakistan last month as temperatures hit 117 (47 degrees Celsius).
Jorge Moreno, a worker, drinks flavored water to cope with the heat wave during his workday at a construction site in Veracruz, Mexico on June 17, 2024. (AP/File)
June was also the 15th straight month that the world’s oceans, more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface, have broken heat records, according to Copernicus data.
Most of this heat is from long-term warming from greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, Julien and other meteorologists said. An overwhelming amount of the heat energy trapped by human-caused climate change goes directly into the ocean and those oceans take longer to warm and cool.
The natural cycle of El Ninos and La Ninas, which are warming and cooling of the central Pacific that change weather worldwide, also plays a role. El Ninos tend to spike global temperature records and the strong El Nino that formed last year ended in June.
Another factor is that the air over Atlantic shipping channels is cleaner because of marine shipping regulations that reduce traditional air pollution particles, such as sulfur, that cause a bit of cooling, scientists said. That slightly masks the much larger warming effect of greenhouse gases. That “masking effect got smaller and it would temporarily increase the rate of warming” that is already caused by greenhouse gases, said Tianle Yuan, a climate scientist for NASA and the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus who led a study on the effects of shipping regulations.
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, of the tech company Stripes and the Berkeley Earth climate-monitoring group, said in a post on X that with all six months this year seeing record heat, “that there is an approximately 95 percent chance that 2024 beats 2023 to be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.”
Copernicus hasn’t computed the odds of that yet, Julien said. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month gave it a 50 percent chance.
Global daily average temperatures in late June and early July, while still hot, were not as warm as last year, Julien said.
“It is likely, I would say, that July 2024 will be colder than July 2023 and this streak will end,” Julien said. “It’s still not certain. Things can change.”
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria, said the data show Earth is on track for 3 degrees Celsius of warming if emissions aren’t urgently curtailed. And he feared that an end to the streak of record hot months and the arrival of winter’s snows will mean “people will soon forget” about the danger.
“Our world is in crisis,” said University of Wisconsin climate scientist Andrea Dutton. “Perhaps you are feeling that crisis today — those who live in the path of Beryl are experiencing a hurricane that is fueled by an extremely warm ocean that has given rise to a new era of tropical storms that can intensify rapidly into deadly and costly major hurricanes. Even if you are not in crisis today, each temperature record we set means that it is more likely that climate change will bring crisis to your doorstep or to your loved ones.”
Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world and then reanalyzes it with computer simulations. Several other countries’ science agencies — including NOAA and NASA — also come up with monthly climate calculations, but they take longer, go back further in time and don’t use computer simulations.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani squash player Ashab Irfan defeated India’s Veer Chotrani in the final of the Kanso Open Squash Championship in Houston recently to claim the title, months after he clinched the Rochester Proam tournament in the US.
Irfan, 20, has had an impressive run in the tournament, beating Mexico’s Jorge Luis Gomez Dominguez 8-11, 10-12, 11-4, 11-2 and 11-9 to qualify for the semifinal of the tournament on Friday. He then defeated Canadian Liam Morrison 11-8, 11-6 and 13-11 to qualify for the final.
Meanwhile, Chotrani qualified for the final after beating Mexico’s Alfredo Avila Vergara in the semifinal 11-3, 9-11, 11-7 and 11-7 to qualify for the final of the tournament.
The final between Irfan and Chotrani on Sunday was a close call, with the Pakistani star player prevailing over his Indian opponent after a hard-fought win. Irfan beat Chotrani 11-7, 8-11, 12-10, 8-11 and 11-8 to clinch the trophy.
Irfan could be seen screaming in jubilation after winning the match point, putting his squash racket on the floor as he prostrated on the court amid cheers and claps from the audience.
This is Ashab’s second international squash title this year. The emerging Pakistani talent clinched the Rochester Proam Squash Tournament in April this year after beating Dominguez in the final by a score of 12-10, 11-4, 9-11, and 11-9.
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday congratulated a Christian army officer, Julian Moazzam James, on his promotion to the rank of major-general, Sharif’s office said.
Twenty-two brigadiers were promoted to the rank of major-general in Pakistan Army this week, according to local media reports. The promotions were approved by the Pakistan Army Promotion Board.
In a statement issued by his office, the prime minister expressed his best wishes for Maj. Gen. James in the future.
“The services of the Christian community for the development and defense of Pakistan are unforgettable,” Sharif said. “Maj. Gen. Julian Moazzam James’ professional skills and hard work are a beacon for the young generation.”
Earlier this year, Helen Mary Roberts became the first Christian woman brigadier in the 76-year history of Pakistan. Brig. Roberts belonged to the Army Medical Corps.
Several other members of minority religious communities have also been serving in the Pakistan military on different ranks.
Muslim-majority Pakistan has strived for religious inclusivity in recent years amid continuing social challenges for minority communities.
Last year, Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir commended the role played by the country’s Christian community in its development during a Christmas celebration at Christ Church in Rawalpindi.
He praised their contributions to promoting quality education, health care and philanthropy, as well as their notable contributions to national defense.
KARACHI: A senior counter-terrorism official and a passerby were killed in a gun attack in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, police officials said on Sunday.
Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Ali Raza was posted in investigation cell of counter-terrorism department (CTD) of Sindh provincial police.
Speaking to the media, Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Asif Ejaz Shaikh said two attackers had opened fire on the police officer in Karimabad area.
“It’s hard to say anything at this time, but all CTD officers have been receiving threats,” he said.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Police surgeon Dr. Summayia Syed told Arab News that DSP Ali Raza had received multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, neck and head.
“The bullets were removed,” she told Arab News. “The family didn’t allow a complete postmortem.”
A 38-year-old passerby, Waqar, who worked as a guard with a private security company, was also injured in the attack and succumbed to his injuries during treatment at Jinnah Hospital.
“Waqar had sustained serious gunshot injuries to the chest, flank and inguinal region,” Syed added.
DSP Raza had been actively involved in operations against drug gangs based in Karachi’s Lyari area, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and various sectarian groups, according to Raja Umar Khattab, a senior police officer and a longtime colleague of Raza.
“Ali Raza was a brilliant officer with several successful operations against outlawed groups to his credit,” Khattab told Arab News. “Today, the CTD has lost one of its key team members.”
Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial hub, has had a decades-long history of violence, especially against the law enforcers, by militant groups as well as political, drug and other mafias.
In 2013, the then government of three-time former premier Nawaz Sharif had sanctioned a joint operation against militants and violent criminals in the city, which significantly brought down the crime rate in the subsequent years.
However, sporadic incidents of targeted killings are still reported, while street crimes have continued unabated in the city of more than 20 million.
