There is a reason why Misbah use to bat like the way he use to.
The reason was Misbah always backed himself to make it up at the latter stages. He always backed himself to stay at the crease long enough. THe guy was always determined. If Misbah came in at over no.12, he would always be determined enough to play till the last 50th over of the match.
THe guy always had confidence himself.
A big reason for Misbah being able to bat like this was he had perfection in his defense. Straight bat defense with a bent elbow. Guys like Umar Akmal and Sarfraz Ahmed can't even defend a ball.
People know about Misbah batting slow, but some people don't realize that Misbah had the ability to make such clean strikes that he could even challenge Afridi at it aswell.
Thus, Misbah always knew how to make up for it at the latter stages.
Changing gears is what i think is very important for One day cricket. And our youngsters should have this ability atleast before making an international debut.
Which he never did 99% of the time. Misbah was an average ODI batsman, with a good power game but zero ability to rotate the strike, which meant that he had too much to do at the end of his innings to improve his SR, and thus would always get out trying to slog everything in sight. His awful strike rotation in the middle-overs is the main reason why he never scored an ODI hundred.
If he had better strike rotation, he would have been a world class ODI batsman because he had the defense, temperament and power. He was very good in T20Is because he would often try to slog from ball one, which is how he should have batted in ODIs. In his quest to rebuild the innings, he would bring the innings to a complete halt, killing any momentum we had. He was not good enough to play those 60 (60) type innings that proper anchors do, but he was certainly good enough to play 60 (40) type impact innings. I don't blame Misbah for our low scores in our dreadful ODI era of 2011-2015, but I really do think that Misbah should have backed his striking ability more. He would have scored almost the same amount of runs anyway, but at a much better SR, which would have made his innings more impactful and we would have won quite a few matches that we lost. I can single out many, many examples where a more aggressive approach on his part would have yielded better results (and I won't talk about Mohali), but one of the easy examples is the third ODI in India in 2013.
We were chasing 168 and lost by 10 runs. Misbah scored 39 in 82 balls, and had he backed his hitting ability a bit more, especially against someone like Jadeja who was allowed to bowl 10 overs for only 19 runs, we would have won that match. Against Jadeja, he only scored 7 runs in the 23 deliveries that he faced, and we both know that he can easily hit him for a couple of sixes giving his clean hitting against spin.
In short, Misbah had all the skills (barring the strike rotation) that you need for a top ODI batsman, but he took up a role for which he was not suited. He was never an anchor because he couldn't rotate the strike, and thus should have utilized himself as a slogger because he was a fantastic hitter, and he has shown that at various times in his career. Malik was awful in that period, but he was a much better anchor than Misbah, because he is always looking to rotate the strike and is able to find gaps and run hard.
