Success is a slow-acting poison. It’s the "Series A" trap of the sporting world. You hit one big milestone, the valuation skydives into the stratosphere, and suddenly everyone in the office thinks they’re Steve Jobs. For the Pakistan national cricket team, that moment happened in Dubai in 2021. They beat India by ten wickets. It was a clinical, brutal demolition. It was also, according to former director of cricket Mickey Arthur, the beginning of the end.

Arthur didn’t mince words in his recent post-mortem. He described a locker room that transformed from a hungry collective into a collection of fiefdoms. "Everyone became disrespectful," he noted. It’s a familiar story for anyone who has watched a promising startup implode after its first major exit. The hunger disappears. The ego takes the wheel. The focus shifts from the product to the press release.

In the aftermath of that 152-0 scorecard, the players didn’t just win a match; they became untouchable icons in a country that treats cricketers like demigods. But icons don't like being told their backlift is getting sloppy. Icons don't want to hear about fitness drills or tactical discipline. When you’ve conquered the biggest rival on the planet, who is a coach to tell you that you’re playing too many dot balls?

This isn't just about bad attitudes. It’s about systemic rot. The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) operates with the stability of a crypto exchange in a bear market. Chairs are swapped, coaches are fired via WhatsApp, and strategies are rewritten every fiscal quarter. In that vacuum of leadership, the players didn't just fill the gap—they built a fortress. Arthur’s comments point to a culture where the hierarchy flipped. The employees started running the board, and the board, desperate for the dopamine hit of a viral win, let them do it.

Look at the friction. We’re talking about a team that went from the highs of 2021 to crashing out of the 2023 World Cup with a whimper. The technical debt piled up. While teams like England and Australia were iterating on "Bazball" or data-driven match-ups, Pakistan was still riding the high of a three-year-old victory. They stopped evolving. They became a legacy system running on outdated firmware, convinced that their brand name would carry them through.

It’s the arrogance of the "one-hit wonder." You see it in tech all the time. A company builds a decent app, gets a billion downloads, and then spends the next five years adding useless features while the core engine breaks. Pakistan’s core engine—their discipline, their bowling hunt, their tactical flexibility—broke. Instead of fixing the bugs, the players reportedly grew "arrogant." They stopped listening to the guys with the clipboards. They started believing their own Instagram comments.

Arthur’s exit wasn't exactly a shock. His "online coach" arrangement was a bizarre experiment that cost the PCB a hefty sum—rumors put the salary package in the high five-figure range monthly—just to have a guy on Zoom calls while the ship was sinking. It was a tech-bro solution to a human problem. You can’t fix a toxic culture through a webcam from Derbyshire.

The fallout is messy. The team is currently a fractured mess of cliques and "rested" superstars. The "disrespect" Arthur mentions isn't just a slight against him; it’s a disregard for the grind. They forgot that beating India is a data point, not a destination. They treated a single win like a lifetime achievement award.

Now, the PCB is trying to reboot the system again. New coaches. New captains. Same old bugs. They’re looking for a "transformative"—wait, let’s call it what it is—a radical overhaul. But you can’t patch a hole in the hull with a fresh coat of paint. If the players truly believe they’ve peaked because they won a group stage game three years ago, no amount of management consulting will save them.

The scoreboard in Dubai hasn't changed, but the world has moved on. The players are still checking their notifications from 2021, wondering why the cheers have turned into boos. It’s hard to hear the truth when you’re still wearing the crown you stole years ago.

Is there a fix? Maybe. But first, someone has to tell the players that the 2021 trophy isn't coming back to save them from a mediocre present.

The real question isn't whether they can win again. It’s whether they can remember how to lose with enough humility to actually learn something. For now, they just look like a unicorn startup that forgot how to code.

Funny how a ten-wicket win can be the worst thing to ever happen to a team.