POTW : Bilal Ahmad15 & Extra_Cover

[MenInG]

2 excellent posts pertaining to Pakistan's dismal efforts in the recently concluded Test series against Australia are our joint winners of the POTW award

Congratulations to [MENTION=147163]Bilal Ahmad15[/MENTION] and [MENTION=145403]Extra_Cover[/MENTION]


Bilal Ahmad15

http://www.pakpassion.net/ppforum/s...w-Things-are-Bad-When&p=11450954#post11450954

When a chairman talks about playing fearless cricket, but in reality he himself is scared.

When the pitches are flat roads taken from a highway road in Rawalpindi, and Karachi because the chairman is so scared that his players can't handle the pace, and decides to make a video saying this.

When the team is still carrying 35, 40, 50-year-old done and dusted players in the team.

When these done and dusted batsmen, plus some rookies, are ultra defensive no matter the match situation.

When you see a bigger crowd in a PSL dead rubber, group stage match than the opening day of a historic
test series.

When the team, led by the captain, decides to use negative bowling line tactics, and then say it's alright, no problem with it.

When the players in the team decide to have a casual chat with the other team, before the match, more focused on themselves having a good image, and not taking anything seriously.

When the captain and the team are going for the draw over the win.

When the players are always casually laughing, hugging way too much, being too cringeworthy, which looks like they don't even care about the result, they don't care about taking a test match seriously.

When the home players get outplayed in their fortress ground by the other team.

When the fans in the city of this supposedly great fortress don't even care about the match, even though the match went to day 5, the fortress was in need of protection, the best batsmen in the country scoring 196, and the home team saving a heavy loss.

When the team and the captain in this match also were going for the draw the whole time, despite the fact they had the ability to change gears and go for the win.

When the chairman realises he has messed up by using roads as the pitches for the first two matches, so he hires an Aussie to sort out the pitch of the next match, due to his love, or rather trauma of everything Australian, and gives the guy to make a change within a time period of 5-6 days.

When the crowd of the stadium located in the biggest cricket-loving city in the country, is basically empty.

When the team is once again hugging, casually laughing, joking, every single over, and doesn't take anything seriously. Worse is, when the new batsman from the other team is coming to the crease to start their innings, the bowler is coming up to them having a casual talk.

When the two spinners of the team are as useless as they can get, on the spinner is 50 years old, the other is clueless in his plan, in fact, he probably didn't have a plan apart from "bowl the over as fast as you can so that the bowler from the other end can bowl his over".

When the number 5 batsman of the team, looks like a genuine tail-ender and in this series has a worse technique, stance, balance than the number 7,8,9,10,11th batsman, who are all official tail-enders. What is worse is that this number 5 tail-ender has 13,000+ FC runs, has an average of 55+, has been playing for 10+ years, and so is one of the best products in the country.

When, once again, the batsmen are not changing gears, staying ultra-defensive, and heavily affecting their team's chance of winning the match.

When once again, the approach is to go for the draw rather than the win.

When the media of the team, ordered by the chairman, continuously post cringe-worthy videos, again and again, and again, having no intelligence, no clue at all.

When a home series is lost and the two inspiring leaders are having a casual laugh about it post-match since they probably don't care about the result.

When the team treats a home series like an exhibition tournament and doesn't care about the result.

When the team still technically has no coaches.

When pretty much all the leaders of the team and the board, probably won't make any major changes to the team, despite everything in the board and team collapsing during this series, and so the humiliation, the false promises , all the big, trash talk of "we are fearless cricketers" will continue.

Extra_Cover

http://www.pakpassion.net/ppforum/s...ia-(2022-Test-Series)&p=11449689#post11449689

Pakistan was playing a 3 test match series after a very very long time so it was refreshing to shift from T20s onto test cricket and that too for a 3 match series rather than a 2 match formality series. The best aspect about this series is that this series actually happened after what happened last Oct/Nov through NZ and England pull outs. At least we can now expect teams to start touring Pakistan and not pull out of tours.

Coming onto cricket this has been on of the most negative series we have seen of late. Recently most of the test matches yield result and draws became an anomaly or draws happened when most of the days were rained out. However for this series to yield draw after draw after particularly boring cricket being played was test of nerves for the fans and especially those people who were at the ground. As usual I would try to identify the takeaways for Pakistan cricket from this series below.

THE GOOD

The Core
Undoubtedly the core of this test team are following players.
- Babar Azam
- Rizwan
- Shaheen Shah
All of them had a decent series and the signs are very good to build the team around these core players. It goes without saying that you can only build a strong team if the core holding them is strong and this is a strong core for Pakistan cricket.

Supporting players to the core / Find for Pakistan
During the series we have seen some very decent performances from Abdullah Shafique and Naseem Shah.
On Shafique, he is going to be part of this team for a long time. I particularly like his balance on the crease and from what I have seen so far he has got all the shots in the book so he has a gameplan for wickets around the world. I expect him to do well on overseas tour as well for a simple fact that he is not a limited player. Another major plus point is that he is not mentally weak like most Pakistan young players are. His temperament is very good and it would only get better going forward.
Naseem Shah had a very good series, in fact he outbowled Shaheen Shah especially in the 3rd test. His pace was up and his action was more like what he had in his early days. During Waqar tenure Naseem got less side on and hence lost his rhythm however he is back to his side on bowling action after Waqar has gone which has yielded increase pace and better seam position. I would like Naseem to play county season but at same time I don't want him to miss out on test cricket as there is not many bowlers better than him that can replace him. PCB has to be careful in managing his workload though.


THE BAD

Spin twins
It was very depressing to see Sajid and Nauman being absolutely toothless in all 3 tests. Whilst they didn't get to ball on day 5 wickets I'm quite confident they wouldn't have made difference either. I'm not overly critical of both of them given the wickets were horrible and only took turn on Day 5 when they both didn't get the chance to bowl. I'm also not supportive of significant changes in the lineup on the back of a series. However, heads would need to roll after such a horrible outing and if we are to drop 1 of the 2 it has to be Nauman. One of the main reason for dropping Nauman is simply because he is way more negative than Sajid. Nauman was first one to come up to Babar and suggest bowling over the wicket into the rough when there was no need to do so. Sajid might not be great but atleast bowls more challenging lines. Also Sajid has an edge over Nauman due to fielding. Having said the above both of them should never play in SENA conditions.

Timid batting or just limited batsmen?
I see a lot of threads on here that our batsmen are timid whilst I'm of the opinion that they are just not good enough. Azhar is the prime example of this. From all the high scores in his career most of them have not resulted in wins for Pakistan meaning his runs do not carry weightage on the results of the game. Given we have now got Imam in our team who is again a limited batsman or should I say timid there is no need for Azhar anymore. At best we can only carry 1 such batsman which going forward would be Imam. PCB has to take a bold step in here and ask Azhar to retire with grace.
On Fawad Alam, I'm not going to write much as writing is on the wall and he should not play anymore matches for Pakistan going forward.

Hasan Ali
Someone on this forum posted that Hasan Ali has already overachieved in his career given his lack of abilities and skill. The last year or so has been horrible for Hasan. For me personally the contributions Hasan has had in important losses of prior year is good enough to keep him away from team. I'm talking about 2 dropped catches one in WI test match and one in semi final of T20 world cup. If Hasan cannot contribute on dusty wickets prone to reverse then he is not good for elsewhere. If we have Faheem Ashraf who bowls similar stuff to Hasan Ali there is unfortunately not place for Hasan anymore.

THE WORST

Pitches
Absolute disgrace has been pitches in the first 2 matches of the series with Lahore one being slightly better at best. PCB needs massive investment in curators and improving pitches as we have an important home season coming up and we cannot afford to lose points due to disgraceful pitches.

Captaincy
The captaincy throughout has been absolute shambles. Even in village cricket people don't revert to negative lines at the start of match like Babar did in Day 1 of the match. There was no thought process or plans on display at all. Cummins was head and shoulders above anything Babar could have mustered in the captaincy during the series. Babar needs significant schooling on captaincy if we are to stick with him as captain across formats.

TEST TEAM GOING FORWARD
I have proposed the following recommendation in our test lineups for home and SENA conditions.

[table="width: 500, class: grid"]
[tr]
[td][/td]
[td]HOME[/td]
[td]SENA[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]1[/td]
[td]Abdullah Shafique[/td]
[td]Abdullah Shafique[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]2[/td]
[td]Imam ul Haq[/td]
[td]Imam ul Haq[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]3[/td]
[td]Shan Masood[/td]
[td]Shan Masood[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]4[/td]
[td]Babar Azam (c)[/td]
[td]Babar Azam (c)[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]5[/td]
[td]Kamran Ghulam[/td]
[td]Kamran Ghulam[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]6[/td]
[td]Rizwan (wk)[/td]
[td]Rizwan (wk)[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]7[/td]
[td]Shadab Khan[/td]
[td]Shadab Khan[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]8[/td]
[td]Nawaz[/td]
[td]Faheem Ashraf[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]9[/td]
[td]Sajid Khan[/td]
[td]Dahani[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]10[/td]
[td]Shaheen Shah[/td]
[td]Shaheen Shah[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]11[/td]
[td]Naseem Shah[/td]
[td]Naseem Shah[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

Kamran Ghulam is an absolute must going forward in our team given how well he has been playing for over a year now. I'm also inclined to bring Shan Masood in place of Azhar Ali given Shan has been finding form as well. There is a lot of talk about Saud Shakeel being around but Saud missing out on FC cricket does not help his case. Shadab Khan is a must going forward as our SENA spinner and home leg spinner. He is a much improved bowler and can add the useful contributions in our test team.

Its time to ditch deadweight and bring in match winners as there are potentially too many points to win in the remainder of this year.

 

[PakEngFan]

Congrats both and well deserved.

 

[Bilal Ahmad15]

Thanks for this.

I'm a bit surprised, to be honest, but I will definitely still take it!

 

[Major]

Congrats bilal. I agree with what you wrote on chiarman saab. Well deserve award

Extra cover is just an example of quality over quantity. Posts so little but whatever he posts is pure quality.

 

[Extra_Cover]

Thanks [MENTION=93712]MenInG[/MENTION] appreciate this.

I have said this before and stand by my words that this is a great forum to be a part of and express views on things relevant / important to me. I would continue to post and wish all the best to this forum to expand and gain more popularity in the future.