And that's the concern. Will those days come back.
For a nation that produced Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Abdul Razzaq, Azhar Mahmood, what on earth has gone wrong when we are looking at some of the very average current all-rounders as our next hope.
Notice one thing, all of these above names started as excellent bowlers with decent batting ability and then worked hard on that ability to become all rounders.
That’s because it’s much, much harder to become a good fast bowler if you’re already a great batsman than it is for you to become a good batsman if you’re already a great bowler.
The real reason our fast bowling all rounder stocks have dried up, I postulate, is that our fast bowling stocks have themselves dried up. If we’re barely able to produce many Abdul Razzaq or Azhar Mahmood level bowlers, to begin with, and are giving Test debuts to the likes of Musa Khan, how will we find those who can bowl like them and bat too?
Now we’re doing better work at the grassroots with bowler identification, and there’s more incentive to work on your batting if you’re already decent at it (look at Hassan Ali batting between 6-8). So like [MENTION=152972]Pacy with wisdom[/MENTION] says, hopefully it’s the beginning of a new age.
It’s actually in our process of trying to find gold dust that we end up with bits and pieces cricketers who are 5/10 with the bat and 5/10 with the ball, in the expectation that we can improve both of those attributes to 7/10. Rather, we should look for bowlers who are 8/10 with the ball and 4/10 with the bat, then aim to improve the batting to 6/10.
Otherwise, the only really successful batting all rounders are those with immense, immense natural batting ability like Kallis, Stokes. That is much harder to identify and develop than a 140kph bowler who shows up to a U19 or Lahore Qalandars trial, and has better hand eye coordination with the bat than even they thought they had.
