Believe it or not, Kamran Akmal deserves a statue. We need to commission it while we are in the spirit. We should then wear wicket-keeping gloves and carry it to an important landmark, invite all the news channels, and then "drop" it. With the broken pieces at our feet, we should look at each other with a half-dejected half-sheepish smile, and then channel the resulting anger and frustration by stomping on the broken pieces. This act should then be made open to public for a minimum of three days. The resulting pulverized material should then be put into bottles and sold at medical stores with the following label: "Dissolve in water and take twice a day. We guarantee that despite the flu season, you won't 'catch' anything."

In all seriousness, with fielding this horrendous and batting this fragile, Pakistan deserved to lose the semi-final. But as our team returns from the World Cup, what they deserve is kudos for making it to the semi-finals, and for making sure that the match was on knife's edge for a good 80% of its duration. All this despite:

• Coming out of rock-bottom after the spot-fixing scandal and going through stressful police interrogations and investigations without any psychological support.
• Missing their bowling spearhead in Aamir, and second-in-command in Asif.
• Having lost their captain and confirmed opener, Salman Butt, to spot-fixing scandal, just days before the WC.
• As a result, having shuffled through youngsters like Ahmad Shehzad, Asad Shafiq, and Muhammad Hafeez to find an opening pair during the WC.
• Having a leadership vacuum where even their captain wasn't decided as other teams were landing in host countries for their warm-up games.
• Having lost the right to home-ground and home-crowd due to unfortunate security situation on their home soil, resulting in make-up home games away from home under varying conditions.

The semi-final performance, in light of suffering of Pakistan's cricket due to reasons partly in its control and partly out of its control, begs the question how brilliantly this team would have performed had it experienced political, disciplinary, and psychological normalcy. This kind of suffering puts Pakistan in an unwanted win-win situation, where you tend to feel the same way towards the team the way you would feel towards a flamboyant foster-home kid from a troubled inner-city neighborhood, who despite all the adversity, still makes it to the Ivy League. True he did not graduate with an A, but at least he graduated, and that too with a B+.

Pakistan has countless reasons to be proud of its contribution to cricket. We have repeatedly produced world-class cricketers and memorable cricketing entertainment. But we need to be proud of the right things for the right reasons. For example, I have often found myself guilty of being proud of our team’s unpredictability. After all, why shouldn’t I be? It feels good to be a contender for winning any tournament regardless of recent performance. It feels good to be the team that you cannot put in a box. But the fact is, unpredictability is not a virtue. It's a positive spin to our team's collective bipolar disorder. We need to treat it or at least manage it. Australia considering us a threat and Kenya considering us an opportunity on any given day cannot be and can never be a good thing. We need to strive towards the consistency that West Indies demonstrated in the 70s and that Australia demonstrated in the last couple of decades. What we essentially need to develop is the most striking combination of our unbelievable talent, turned into a disciplined, world-beating cricketing powerhouse.

In order to get there, some immediate steps need to be taken. We need to look at restructuring our one-day team, and start planning for the next World Cup. Now that we have found a good opener in Hafeez, we should consider promoting Umar Akmal as his opening partner. Umar has always appeared confident against pace bowling, has the right mental attitude, and can be a very good and aggressive partner for Hafeez. As for our middle-“dis”-order, the first thing that we need to do is to get really, really worried. If middle-order is the spine of a team's batting, then our batting is spineless --- and it shows! Just admitting that we don’t have a middle-order is a hard pill to swallow. I consider this to be our most difficult challenge to address. We need to put a “Now Hiring” sign for three reliable middle-order batsmen – a one-down equivalent of Zaheer Abbas, a two-down equivalent of Javed Miandad, and a three-down preferably more agile equivalent of Inzamam-ul-Haq. And if I haven’t already driven my point clear on Kamran Akmal, we need a wicket-keeper batsman equivalent of Moin Khan. We have produced such world-class talent before, and there is no reason why we should expect to produce it again.

Some might argue that reconstructing almost half the team is a tall order, especially since our supply line for reliable batsmen has recently been as dry as a bone. The argument holds merit, but it does not mean that we should lose hope. It does not mean that despite the passion and talent, we should settle for a team that scores 300-plus in one game, and is out for 80 in the next. We all know that with our fragile batting, we are an incomplete team. Deep down inside, we know that we would not have been world champions even if we had won the semi-final and the final. I have often argued with friends on how Kapil Dev's India from 83 had won the World Cup but were not the world champions. I would have argued on the same grounds had Pakistan won this tournament. We were far more deserving in 87 and 99. We need to realize that bowling represents just two wheels of a car. We need the two batting wheels to drive us home. Otherwise we'll stay where we are. The good news is that we don’t have to worry about a powerful engine. In our passion, aggression, and sheer cricketing talent, we have all the horse-power we need. Needless to say, even with four wheels and a powerful engine, we'll have to be careful not to run ourselves into a bus just before reaching home --- or as they say in cricketing terms, “drop six sitters in the semi-final of a World Cup that ain't coming back for the next 4 years!”