A player's reputation plays an outsized role when it comes to selection in Pakistan. This reputation can be based on one or two incredible bowling spells or a few match-turning innings. These performances need not to be in the format for which a team is being selected. If there is potential, he is deemed to be good enough across formats.
This philosophy has thrived despite a myriad of changes in the men's selection committee over the last few years. Imad Wasim and Mohammad Amir went to the 2024 T20 World Cup after reversing their international retirements and later that year Babar Azam was put on a plane to South Africa after being dropped a month previously because of his poor Test form. Despite missing the majority of T20Is in 2025, including the all-important Asia Cup, he was also added to the squad for T20 World Cup earlier this year.
There has been limited success - ODI series wins in Australia and South Africa - but by and large this selection method has not yielded results. The recent embarrassment of a 0-2 sweep in Bangladesh seems to have jolted the selection committee into a host of changes in Pakistan's squad for their next Test assignments in West Indies and England, the most significant being the axing of Shaheen Shah Afridi, who with 34 Tests is the most experienced currently active Pakistani fast bowler in the format.
Shaheen is a shadow of what he was when he first emerged in 2018 and his struggles since his return to Test cricket from a knee injury in 2023 are widely documented. The inswingers are not menacing anymore and the threat of reverse swing has receded as his bowling speeds have declined.
Pakistan are currently bottom of the World Test Championship table, exactly where they finished the last cycle. While there has not been much batting success to celebrate, it is their inability to take all 20 wickets that has hurt them the most. And Shaheen - who had leapfrogged the likes of Mohammad Abbas and Hasan Ali to become Pakistan's spearhead - had been integral to their fast bowling plans. No bowler had bowled more than his 809.4 overs for Pakistan in Tests between his debut and 2022 injury. Yasir Shah - with 606.2 overs - was a distant second. The second most number of overs bowled by a Pakistan fast bowler during this window was 461.3 by Hasan.
After his return from injury, they initially looked to manage his workloads, resting him for the third Test on the Australian tour of 2023-24 so he could be fresh for his maiden - and solitary - T20I captaincy assignment in New Zealand. They curated specific conditions for him and his fellow fast bowlers by leaving substantial grass on surfaces so they could thrive when Bangladesh toured Pakistan in 2024. But an under-par performance in the first Test in which he took two wickets in a 10-wicket defeat forced them to quickly look beyond.
Then head coach Jason Gillespie told a press conference before the second Test that while Pakistan will be looking to salvage their pride, Shaheen would work on the technical aspects of his bowling. But Pakistan called him back for the England series, making him toil on a flat Multan deck for 26 overs and a solitary wicket. They left him out of the second and third Tests and transitioned from featherbeds to rank turners at home. And in what was effectively a public loss of faith in his abilities, they excluded him from the subsequent Test tour of South Africa, where conditions are ripe for fast bowling. That move, however, only underscored the profound hole in Pakistan's fast bowling stocks as the low bowling speeds of those on tour came under scrutiny.
With the start of a new WTC cycle, Pakistan went back to Shaheen in October last year for the home Tests against South Africa. Though they stuck to home turners, there were glimpses of the old Shaheen who moved the new and old ball in Lahore. But seven months later, in Mirpur, this new Shaheen was back bowling benign mid-120kph deliveries. Pakistan duly replaced him with Khurram Shahzad for the second Test in Sylhet. This was the third time in the last two years that Shaheen had been dropped from a series after playing the first Test. In all, Shaheen has played nine of the 18 Tests Pakistan have played since he recovered from his knee injury.
Nothing establishes how far Shaheen has fallen in the longer format than the comparison of his numbers before and after his injury. Before the dive on the outfield in Galle that injured him, Shaheen had picked up 99 wickets at 24.86. His next 27 wickets have cost over 40 runs apiece. His strike rate since his return to Tests has ballooned to 67.6.
That this selection committee was looking to move on from Shaheen was evident when they left him out for a red-ball camp at the NCA last month. While a PCB official at the time said that Shaheen had been named only in the white-ball camp by virtue of being the ODI captain, there seems to be a sense among the selectors that the fast bowler is now more inclined towards limited-overs cricket.
"Shaheen is an excellent bowler but at times a player has to pick which format he wants to play," Aaqib Javed, Pakistan selector and director high performance centre, said while announcing the squad. "It is because of this reason we have introduced the structure of track-based format-wise central contracts recently ... We are concerned with the pace of our fast bowlers. It is unacceptable that their speeds drop to 126kph on the second or third day of a Test, which was the case in Bangladesh. We have brought in Ubaid Shah for that purpose and we have made these changes on the basis of evidence, which included the use of speed guns, that we gathered over the recent camp."
Pakistan seem comfortable to be moving on from the bowler they had invested their hopes in for a long time, but whether that remains the case will depend, as ever, on how their immediate next assignments go.