Shoaib Malik thank you for your important role and we won't forget about your century. With that said drop malik and bring in Aamir and stick with the same team. lets go with all out attack with pacers and specialist spinners. Rana can bat so he can move up the order.
Kamran Akmal
Afridi
Younis Khan
Yusuf
Misbah
Umer Akmal
Rana Naveed
Umer Gul
Asif
Ajmal
Amir
We have four specialist batsmen, 2 all rounders and a wicket keeper/batsman. Adding another batsman won't make us a world beater but adding an extra bowler will give us a killer instinct! Also to note, Nazir and Malik may not be able to handle a seaming wicket.
Even though Gul struggled little bit but he seems to be the quickest among all the bowlers and can cause some problems to the batsmen. NZ historically always struggled against our pace attack so we should keep it that way.
Win the toss( easy part), bat first and if we collapse with score below 200 , we will still have hope to win with our quality bowlers. See it's that simple
This is a good problem to have! We have depth in all aspects!
This team will get bowled out for < 150 (cf. WC Final 1999)
Playing 4 seamers is suicidal when batting is our main weakness on seaming tracks. NZ play on such seaming (+ wet) tracks at home all the time! So playing an extra pacer makes no sense to me.
Just because we have 4 decent seamers at the moment does not mean everyone can get into the side and just because it is a seaming wicket does not mean spinners will have no impact on the game! One of the seamers WILL HAVE TO sit out the SF. And Rana I know can bat a bit but he is no Afridi or Razzaq (who are both genuine batters). His batting is not even as good as Wasim Akram. He is NOT a genuine all-rounder. Rana can give you a quick 12-15 at best which is not gonna help esp. if we have a mini collapse at the top of the order.
Let's not overeact
Play 7 batsmen + 3 seamers + Ajmal (Afridi being the 5th bowler + Malik as 6th option) and hope that it is the 'hungry' Pakistan that turns up on the day
1.Kamran Akmal
2.Shahid Afridi
3.Yunis Khan
4.Muhammad Yusuf
5.Shoaib Malik
6.Misbah ul Haq
7.Umar Akmal
8.Umar Gul
9.Saeed Ajmal
10.Muhammad Asif
11.Muhammad Aamer
I dont care if it weakens the batting. but I'd kill to see an all out bowling attack: Aamer Asif, Gul, Rana, Ajmal and Afridi.
When we bat well we dont need the extra batsman. When we dont, I figure we could dispense with gifting the additional wicket. Specifically Misbah.
All the bowlers are in form its just a matter of pick n choose....
Batting is where we need All the help we can get... Specially facing Bond and vettori we need attacking and defence mixture.....
1.Kamran Akmal
2.Umar Akmal (lets open wid 2 brothers)
3.Yunis Khan (kaya Yunis khan injure nai ho sakta so that ham koi acha player khila sakien )
4.Muhammad Yusuf
5.Shoaib Malik
6.Misbah ul Haq
7.Shahid Afridi
8.Umar Gul
9.Saeed Ajmal
10.Rana Naveed
11.Muhammad Aamer
who would bowl in the depth overs. Rana is doing good in depth at this point but no one is more lethal then gul. despite of some bad starts we know he is the best bowler to finish it offf and he did finish good in all the matches…
This is one of those situations where they have to make a decision which will look not logical to some but there will not nothing anyone can do about it.
I am 100% certain that Aamer and Asif will make the cut. Then it will basically depend on the managment policy. If they think that they need to go all out with a pace attack then obviously it is going to be Ajmal. Othrwise Ajmal will be safe along with Aamer and Asif.
Between Gul and Rana, Gul would have been an automatic pick if someone would have asked me 10 days ago. Things however have changed between then and now.
Finally I strongly think there is no need to reduce the number of batsmen to accomodate an extra bowler. I also don't think Nazir should be playing on this pitch. I really don't care if he is due for a century or double century. He probably will get dismissed trying to pull Bond during his first spell.
