There’s no end to Pakistan’s woes in the Champions Trophy.
If the humiliating loss to New Zealand in the opener in Karachi on Wednesday wasn’t enough, Mohammad Rizwan’s team suffered another setback ahead of their must-win clash against India on Sunday.
Opener Fakhar Zaman was ruled out of the remainder of the tournament with an oblique muscle injury on Thursday. Imam-ul-Haq has been approved by the ICC as Fakhar’s replacement. Fakhar picked up the injury off just the second ball of the tournament, when he tried to stop a cover drive from Will Young off Shaheen Shah Afridi. When he collected the ball, he appeared to be in some discomfort and had to stay out for more than two hours.
As a result, he couldn’t open the innings and batted at No.4. The team was also fined five per cent of their match fee for maintaining a slow over-rate.
Pakistan are on the ropes in their defence of the trophy already, having succumbed to a 60-run defeat on Wednesday. The players arrived in Dubai on Thursday having been subjected to immense criticism for their performance.
Former Pakistan captain Wasim Akram was critical of the “best players” Pakistan currently have. He also termed some of them as ‘parchi’ (selected on reference) players.
“Look, if you want me to be brutally honest, I can be. In our culture, we are like ‘these are our kids, don’t criticise’. It’s very normal here. But I think these are our best players. If there were someone better than them, they would’ve been selected,” Akram said on YouTube’s Dressing Room show.
“Here, we have this popular word called parchi. At this level, parchi doesn’t work. It’s very difficult to explain this to our people.”
Batting has been the real problem for Pakistan and unless they find ways to pile runs on the board at a decent pace, the bowlers will find the going tough in Dubai.
Former fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar too was straightforward in his analysis. “Pakistan is playing completely different cricket compared to what the rest of the world is doing. There are no impact players, strike-rate is very slow. They don’t even play run-a-ball. We leak a lot of runs,” he said.
Pakistan need to bring about a drastic change in their approach and it will be very difficult for them to stop an in-form Indian team.