Is dropping Mohammad Abbas for the Test series against South Africa the correct decision?

[shah_1]

He is finished

 

[Muhammad]

If he hadn’t been bowling well then it would be fair enough.

Appreciate it’s a wicket taking business, but he bowled pretty well for much of the series and certainly helped to keep some control, demanding respect from the batsmen.

I also understand you can’t keep citing bad luck indefinitely, but I just cannot see who is being selected that is better. Ok so you can select youngsters on potential, but to be completely axed from a squad of 20 which includes a journeyman 36 year old with no international experience stinks.

 

[Savak]

The old Abbas would have got a heap of wickets on these New Zeland tracks. Unfortunately, Abbas has lost almost all his venom over the last few years and his performances have literally dropped off a cliff.

There's no point drying up the runs if you present no threat of getting a wicket. All you're doing is slowing the game but not actually winning it. In a 5 day game, a batsman who scores at a strike rate of 40 can usually win you a game if he doesn't get out. So by not getting anyone out, or even threatening to get anyone out, Abbas isn't actually helping the team.

There was a time where in county cricket, Abbas was just returning ridiculously good stats. Much like his international career though, he now produces nowhere near those figures in county cricket.

The point is that all signs are showing a steep and terminal decline for Abbas and this looks to me to be the end of the road for him.

I could list a hundred Pakistani players who have gone down this route of terminal decline. I really do not understand why this is so common in Pakistani cricket. One minute a player looks World class. Next minute that same player struggles to hold a bat or struggles to bowl anything of substance. In the current set of players, that is true in the case of Abbas, Naseem, Yasir Shah (showing some signs of getting better), Hassan Ali (yes, he is looking promising again but his drop in performance was extradoniary when he last played for Pakistan), Fakhar Zaman.

There are plenty of examples in the last crop of players too (Ahmed Shehzad, Nasir Jamshed etc etc). How can all of these players perform at exceptional levels for a consistent period of time and then one day, they just suddenly stop performing forever. It's such an intriguing and annoying part of Pakistani cricket and I can't explain it.

People saying Abbas creates pressure by being economical. That is rubbish, his job is to take wickets. The fact he fails to take wickets, doesn't create any pressure and the opposition is content to see him off means that the likes of Shaheen and Naseem come under pressure to take wickets when the opposition have a platform and they end up conceeding runs. Abbass becomes useless when the ball gets older and the captain finds it pointless to give him longer spells in the middle which means more pressure on the likes of Shaheen and Naseem to get wickets and hence they leak runs.

 

[TeamPak95]

How bad is his shoulder? If he can get that fixed, then at the very least he can bowl 10km/h faster and then, perhaps, be amongst the wickets again.

 

[shamaan]

It is the right decision to drop him lost alot of pace and wasnt taking wickets