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Will Imran's ideas work in efforts to turn around Pakistan cricket?

Imran may be all over the place as prime minister but there's no denying the position he held, and continues to hold, in Pakistani cricket. He was one of the most empowered captains in the game; able to bypass selection as well as management to get the team he wanted. Nobody crossed him among the boys or the Board. Even in his last outing as skipper - when the team brought back the World Cup - a couple of selectors resigned because Imran insisted on taking along an overweight, tried-and-failed lad from Multan, Inzamam ul Haq, because "he would win us the Cup."

Yet for all his influence, Imran was not able to impact the domestic cricket structure in the way he wanted. He always despised the inter-departmental model, where banks, public sector enterprises, and other companies fought over the national cup. Instead, Imran believed teams based on cities and regions would generate more interest and therefore produce better, more competitive, cricketers. He knew, he always said, because he'd played in the English and Australian domestic circuits and liked what had seen there.

Now that Imran is PM, which means he's also the chief patron of the PCB (Pakistan Cricket Board), efforts are already underway to implement his blueprint on the domestic setup. That was the number-one agenda he put in front of the new PCB chairman, Ehsan Mani. And that's what Mani's asked of his new managing director, Waseem Khan.

Now that's a fine team. Mani is former president of the International Cricket Council (ICC), and a much respected one at that, while Khan is something of a prodigy who's just been imported from England (at a whopping two-million-plus rupees per month). Among other things, he's been the first Pakistani/Asian origin Brit to play first class cricket there, author of Wisden's book of the year for 2007, and chief executive of the Leicestershire Cricket Club 2014-18. All that remains is to watch the star team implement the magic formula and an overhauled domestic structure will churn out quality cricketers in no time.

Just two questions here. One, wasn't the domestic structure - yes the bad, departmental model - already throwing up quality players for 70 years? If it were so broken down, where did Hanif Mohammad, Imtiaz Ahmed, Fazal Mehmood, Zaheer Abbas, Javed Miandad, Wasim Akram and Imran himself come from? It's a much longer list, of course, which spans generations of top quality players who not only met the highest international standards but also beat the best teams in the world.

Also, it turns out that not only were they thriving under the departmental domestic system, but rather in most cases because of it. The system, introduced by Pakistan's first Test captain, the late Abdul Hafeez Kardar, meant that you were not just playing for a department, but were also employed by it. Since that took care of the bills and catered to the most pressing domestic demographic, it gave players the right incentive to give it their best, so to speak. Representing the city or region is all very nice, but it runs into unnecessary glitches by getting our boys to emulate models that work for other, much better provided for societies.

And two, how's the new managing director really going to make a difference here? When the model you're looking to implement is as top-down as they come, meaning it's simply a matter of applying someone else's formula, you need a management clerk more than an innovative, expensive, foreign executive. Besides, why is there always the sense that there is never anybody good enough within the country for some of the Board's most straight forward needs? Must these jobs go to outsiders and that too at far more exorbitant rates than the Board would ever offer any local applicant?

Nobody can deny that Pakistani cricket has declined over the last decade or so. And unless something is done urgently it too might go the way of other sports, like hockey and squash, which we once dominated but then crashed out altogether. But replacing a system that has worked, with its flaws, of course, for 70 years with something that works for someone else might not be the best idea. Even in its worst years the national team is number-one in T20, was number one in Tests till Misbah was around, and has remained 'right up there' in one-days except for the very recent past.

Surely it's a better idea to utilse the talent that this system has produced, identify problems that the old, and new, timers encountered and experienced over the years, and put together an institutional mechanism that removes inefficiencies one by one. But Imran's never really been open to advice, especially when it comes to cricket.

Shahab Jafry is a senior journalist based in Lahore, Pakistan