LAHORE – Pakistan cricket team’s chief selector and head coach, Misbah ulHaq has come down hard on his players after the T20 international seriesloss against Sri Lanka, saying it is an eye-opener for the national team.
“It is failure of the team in both the T20 matches and I take fullresponsibility of this downfall,” he said ahead of the third and last matchof the T20 series on Wednesday (tomorrow).
“We have one last game remaining and still there is a chance for theplayers to reunite and to rethink what went wrong and to develop a spiritand confidence to perform better,” he added.
“Losing is never good, especially against a team that is without theirmajor players, and it’s an eye-opener.
“We can see deficiencies in every department: bowling, batting andparticularly the way we got out against spin, and also our death bowling,”he said in a serious tone.
“There was a clear difference between the two teams. Despite beinginexperienced, they were disciplined and did everything right, while wecompletely failed to implement our plan,” he added.
Read Top Stories
Misbah admitted that Babar has had a huge role to play in making Pakistanthe number one side in T20Is and that his failures have left the sideexposed. “We earned number one ranking in T20s but if you dig deeper, whathas been our strength mostly – it’s been due to Babar Azam’s runs and hedidn’t score in two games and we’ve been exposed,” said the former captain.
Commenting on the performances of recalled duo Ahmed Shehzad and UmarAkmal, the head coach said: “Both the recalled players have performed wellwherever they’ve played in the last one year including the Pakistan Superleague and they were among the best.
“It’s unfortunate in our circuit, there is no other batsman in T20s who hadperformed better than them. Players, who have performed in domestic, surelydeserve a chance, and that’s why we offered them,” he added.
