It made my blood boil to see this pathetic individual attempting to impress the NZ players with his English at the end of the last test despite looking like a garbage tail-ender out in the middle. His average is once again below 30 after almost 50 test match innings, and to this day I've never seen him play a cover drive or cut-shot in front of square, such is his lack of talent.
With the introduction of Zafar/Shadab, Misbah seems to have stumbled his way upon a lower-order that can give you around 100 runs per innings. Take scores of 100, 50 and 50 from the trio of Babar, Fawad and Rizwan, you're looking at an automatic 300 runs. Where we continue to be let down is the top 3. If Azhar can somehow score 30-50 per innings to take the pressure off the middle order, ideally if our openers can combine to give a 50 run partnership we're good to go. Unfortunately our terrible openers barely give us 20 runs cumulatively, which puts immense pressure on the rest of the batting line-up.
Despite the lack of talent on offer, the solution is simple. Keep Abid around for now, as he's shown he can give you around 15-25 runs. Test Sharjeel Khan, Imran Butt, Israrullah, Imam-ul-Haq etc and hope at least one of them can give you an average of 35-37 runs for 2-3 years. If not, bump up Azhar and bring in one of the promising middle-order batsmen in the short-run. Finally, the PCB should put each and every available resource into grooming Haider Ali, Omair Bin Yousuf, Abdullah Shafique and Ali Zaryab as future Test-level openers.
