Pakistan on the verge of being knocked out
on June 13th, 2009 at 2:38 pmPakistan gave away 20 extra runs in the match against SriLanka they eventually lost by 19 runs, in contrast SriLanka only gave three extra runs. Sohail Tanvir was the main culprit, it seems Younis Khan doesn’t have a mind of his own whatever Imran Khan says he follows it blindly, I really doubt that Imran has watched Sohail Tanvir playing lately otherwise he would have never backed him. Sohail has been in poor form for quite some time now, he has problems with his rythym and run up often over stepping and failing to control his line. I wonder Why Younis Khan is continuing to persist with Tanvir when he has Rao Iftikhar on the bench, Rao during the last year has performed much better than Tanvir.
Eventually it was the batting which failed Pakistan, Shahid Afridi, Aamir and Saeed Ajmal did a superb Job to contain SriLanka around 150. Pakistan still lost the match as most of the senior players are giving just half performances just enough so that they can retain their place in the team, Afridi gave great performance with the ball but has given zero performance with the bat his fielding has also not been that great,
Shoaib Malik and Misbah alway get good starts and just when it looks like they are going to finish it they throw their wicket away. Both Misbah and Shoaib have not been playing their big shots Misbah has been the biggest culprit playing uncharacteristically slow.
But this is not the main problem, Younis Khan has been stubbornly persisting with an out of form Salman Butt, Pakistan has the weakest opening pair out of all the teams and that is mainly because of poor team selection by Abdul Qadir and Younis Khan. The team management and the selectors deliberately left out Imran Nazir and Nasir Jamshed, Younis Khan forced for the inclusion of Shahzaib Hassan a player of whom nobody has ever heard of before, Qadir not only ignored Nasir, Imran Nazir and Khurram for the T20 WC but also excluded them from Pakistan’s A team clearly shows either somebody at the board or the selectors do not want to strengthen the team by introducing fresh talent they want status quo in the team.
The tiff between Younis Khan and Qadir, and the tiff between the board and the ICL players have seriously crippled Pakistan’s team in this WC.
Abdul Razzak is going to make his International comeback but Younis Khan’s team won’t be able to win if the seniors won’t give their 100%.
Shahzaib is looking good. So Younis didn’t made a bad choice afterall.
Pakistan is at it’s best when their backs are against the wall. One day they are heros and the next zeros.
Pakistan dropped Salman Butt and Sohail Tanvir for this game, Tanvir was replaced with Razzaq and But with Shahzaib. Razzaq took two important wickets in his first two overs and sealed the game for Pakistan, now I hope that Shahzaib gives Pakistan a good start so that the team mangement can forget about Butt forever.
What a Catch! Afridi you’r the man.
Razzak makes his comeback with a bang. I wasn’t sure if he will be effective with the ball but he proved everybody wrong. He also showed what Pakistan were missing in their bowling swing. Welcomebacl Razzaq.