Malik, team to face board review

Shoaib Malik, the Pakistan captain, is expected to be grilled by the Pakistan board in a review meeting set to discuss the recent series reversal against India. Pakistan lost the one-day series 3-2 before going down in the Tests too, their first series defeat in India in 27 years.

Team manager Talat Ali and media manager Ahsan Malik will also attend the meeting, to be chaired by board chairman Nasim Ashraf. Two selectors are also expected to be present, though Salahuddin Ahmed, the chief selector, is unwell and unable to attend. Geoff Lawson, the Pakistan coach, was also supposed to attend the meeting but the board permitted him to return to Sydney for his son's graduation ceremony.

"The meeting has been called to carry out a post-mortem of our team's performance in India," Shafqat Naghmi, the board's Chief Operating Officer, told The News. "Obviously a lot of questions will be asked because we didn't really perform well on the tour.

"The meeting will not just be about singling out the people who are to be blamed for the defeats in India. It would be to analyse what went wrong during the tour and more importantly we would be expecting people to come out with solid suggestions to bring about improvement."

As expected, there is speculation about the results of such a review, some suggesting that major changes are in the offing. But that is unlikely and a board source told Cricinfo, that no major changes are expected. There is likely to be a firmer policy on the fitness issues that have so crippled Pakistan on recent tours.

Pakistan have only an ODI series against Zimbabwe in January, before their next major assignment: a home series in March-April 2008 against all-conquering Australia.