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World Cup-winning coach Gary Kirsten has opened up about his ill-fated stint as head coach of the Pakistan white-ball team, where he submitted his resignation just six months into the job.
Kirsten took over the reins of Pakistan’s white-ball coaching in April 2024, with Jason Gillespie taking over the Test team. Both coaches were removed from the national selection panel after Pakistan lost the first Test at home against England. Kirsten handed his resignation a day after teams for ODI and T20I tours of Australia and New Zealand were picked last year.
“It was a tumultuous few months. I realised quite quickly I wasn’t going to have much of an influence. Once I was taken off selection and asked to take a team and not be able to shape the team, it became very difficult as a coach then to have any sort of positive influence on the group,” Kirsten said on the Wisden Cricket Patreon podcast.
Kirsten, however, suggested that he would be open to returning as coach if there was no ‘influential noise’ and if the circumstances were right.
“If I got invited back to Pakistan tomorrow, I would go, but I would want to go for the players, and I would want to go under the right circumstances,” he said.
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“Cricket teams need to be run by cricket people. When that’s not happening and when there’s a lot of noise from the outside that’s very influential noise, it’s very difficult for leaders within the team to walk a journey that you feel like you need to walk in order to take this team to where it needs to go.
“I’m too old now to be dealing with other agendas, I just want to coach a cricket team, work with the players – I love the Pakistan players, they’re great guys. I had a very short period of time with them, and I feel for them. More than any other team in the world, they feel the pressure of performance massively, when they lose it’s hectic for them and they feel that.
Former Pakistan cricketer Aaqib Javed took over as interim head coach after Kisten stepped down, before he was replaced in the white-ball formats by Mike Hesson.
