Many years ago, there was a criminal who committed a crime.
The king gave him an option to choose to die by rope or take what's behind the big dark mysterious iron door. The criminal immediately chose the rope. As the noose was being tightened around him, he asked the thing, what is behind the "Big mysterious dark door". The king laughed and said nearly everyone asks the same question. So, what is behind that dark door, the criminal insisted.
The king said "Freedom, but most people are so scared of whats behind the unknown, they choose the rope"
Pakistan team is winning matches no doubt. It is winning matches, that it regularly lost perhaps a year or two ago.
But they are failing to WIN games that matter the most. Be it the final of the T20 World Cup, the final of the Asia Cup, the final against a very good T20 team England (being 3-2 up in the series), they have consistently ended up on the losing side.
I am going to focus the rest of the article not on HOW well we played a one-off match against India or bilaterals, but our failure in critical knockout games repeatedly.
A quick look at the issue shows that the middle order is not good enough.
I will bite the bitter pill and accept that the middle order could perhaps be tons better. That is fact. It is undeniable.
But many people are oblivious to the fact that since the middle order is so terrible and since the openers are failing to make runs at a pace that is good enough in CRUCIAL matches, there is something wrong in the psyche of the team that needs to change.
I propose the main problem Pakistan is faced with is that the head coach, captain and everyone else in the team is considering AVERAGES as the hallmark of a good T20 player. Since Babar and Rizwan have legendary averages in T20, they are super. They must be doing something right. And that means, they get away with whatever approach or method they use. There is very little critical analysis of how they play as long as they reach the 50 or 70 runs in the innings.
This creates a double-edged sword problem. If Babar and Rizwan are striking 50 to 70 runs in every game, Pakistan should consistently hit scores above 200 in KNOCKOUT games.
But they aren't. Even though they score, they score at a pace which gives just about enough time for middle order to throw their bat at everything and make some extra runs. But the middle order is NOT capable enough to this. They are definitely poor in form and performance. We end up short.
We have had 3 finals (T20 World Cup, Asia Cup, T20 versus England) where this approach has failed and we have lost.
Now when anyone proposes a change. A new approach, Perhaps a faster opener at the cost of demoting one of the openers, the law of averages tells us that the guy who enters won't average 50 like Rizwan or 45 like Babar. But he DOESN'T NEED TO. All he needs to do is to score 30 off 15 balls and go back to the hut.
That extra 30 runs we are NOT able to score at the end of the innings, could be critical and we can try to score them while opening.
So what in T20 does help win? Yes, you probably need one of Babar or Rizwan to come down at 3 and do the same thing of holding one end. But the other end simply has to be made of strikers who come and go.
In T20 its not even the STRIKE RATE that helps win. That is a misconception. A huge one. If that was the case, a guy who hits 12 of 2 balls would help his team win. He doesn't help either even though he has a SR of 200.
In T20 it is the "impact" that a player has on a game that defines a win.
Why do you think the major teams of the world are looking for a Warner, Green or Allen at the top to open for them? Is it because they are looking at AVERAGE or STRIKE RATE? No.
They are looking for impact. They know if Allen scores 30 from 15 balls, NZ have a start of 60/1 in 6 overs. That means rest of the team has to score 140 in 14 overs to hit 200 which is probably going to be a winning score 90 percent of the time.
If you score 40/0 in 6 overs and end up with 80 in 10 overs and around 100/2 in 12 overs even though it looks good on paper, you are asking the middle order to score 100 runs in the last 8 overs to get to 200. The openers have hit their 50s. But the team has lost as the middle order won't be able to hit 100 in 8 overs.
So what brings that stubborn and refusal to change.
Its the unknown. What if it goes worse than what we have?
People get scared. People act like the criminal who chose the rope because it was the fear of the unknown. They consistently put forward the trailing argument that openers are scoring the 50 runs and the rest of the team has to do better.
Unless Pakistan does not understand that T20 is not about averages and strike-rates but about the impact a batsman has in the team, they won't win the crucial knockout games.
They will continue to loiter just at the edge, hoping for a magical Babar or Rizwan innings to bail them which will never come.
