By Staff Reporter
LAHORE: Pakistan have appointed Michael Smith, a former South African domestic batter with no international playing career, as the head coach in charge of resurrecting the national side’s ailing batting line-up, the Pakistan Cricket Board confirmed on Tuesday.
The 46-year-old has signed a two-year deal that will see him work across all three formats, red-ball and white-ball alike, with his first assignment arriving almost immediately: a three-Test series in England beginning at Headingley on 19 August.
The timing could hardly be more pointed. Pakistan are currently mid-collapse in the Caribbean, where they trail West Indies 1-0 in a two-match series after being bowled out for 120 while chasing a modest target of 211 in Tarouba last week — a defeat that extended their run of away Test losses to eight in a row, the worst such sequence in the team’s history. The second Test in Port of Spain, still in progress, offers Pakistan’s last chance to salvage the series before Smith’s tenure officially begins.
Confirming the appointment, the PCB said Smith would work “across both red-ball and white-ball formats” and would join the squad in the build-up to the England series. According to the board, he featured in 89 first-class matches, 72 List A games and 16 T20 fixtures during a domestic playing career that ran from 2003 to 2013, scoring 7,029 runs in total, including nine centuries and 40 half-centuries. He never played international cricket for South Africa.
It is on the coaching side, rather than as a player, that Smith has built his reputation. He holds a Level 4 coaching qualification and arrives with substantial experience of Pakistan’s domestic circuit, having worked with three franchises in the Pakistan Super League — Islamabad United, Karachi Kings and, this past season, Multan Sultans, where he served as assistant coach. That familiarity with several of the country’s leading batters is understood to have counted heavily in his favour during the selection process.
Beyond Pakistan, Smith has held the batting coach role at Australia’s Hobart Hurricanes and with Cricket Tasmania, and has also worked as a coaching consultant for two South African provincial sides, KZN Inland and Eastern Province.
The role had been vacant on a permanent basis since Shahid Aslam departed following the 2024 T20 World Cup, a position he had taken up in November of that year after succeeding the former Test captain Mohammad Yousuf. Since then, Pakistan have cycled through a string of caretaker arrangements. Asad Shafiq, one of the side’s most experienced Test batters, was drafted in as interim batting coach in April this year for the home series against Bangladesh and has continued in the role through the tour of the West Indies, doubling up with his separate duties as a national selector. The PCB opened its search for a permanent appointment in May, inviting applications through public advertisement, before settling on Smith.
The urgency behind the hire is not hard to trace. Pakistan’s batting has repeatedly buckled from winning or competitive positions over the past two years, with collapses in South Africa, Bangladesh and now the Caribbean becoming a recurring theme rather than an aberration. Captain Babar Azam, speaking after the Tarouba defeat, acknowledged as much. “We played good cricket in the last few days but today we were not up to the mark as a batting unit,” he said. “We lost back to back wickets. We are working on it and will look to make sure it doesn’t happen in the next matches.”
Azam also pointed to the absence of the regular Test captain Shan Masood, who is nursing a hairline fracture and was unable to bat at number three, as a contributing factor, though the broader pattern of batting fragility long predates that particular setback.
Pakistan currently sit ninth in the ICC World Test Championship standings, and face a steep climb if they are to have any realistic hope of contending for a top-two finish. With the second Test against West Indies still to be settled and a testing tour of England to follow almost immediately after, Smith will have little time to make an impression before his methods are put under serious scrutiny.
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