Couldn't agree with that more. If you think about it, it's Younis all around, his faith that Imran was due for a big one, his insistence on keeping Rana over Asif (and it was his instence based on the reports from the past few weeks) and his dropped catch.
The openers still gave us a decent start (46). So one can't really fault Imran Nazir today. What is the guarantee there that if Shoaib Malik had opened the innings with Akmal he would have scored more than Nazir's 28. Malik usu. fails on seaming pitches (even Kamran Akmal has a better technique than him on such tracks) and really only delivers against India.
In the present team I w'd back only the two Y's and the two Akmals to survive on such tracks. The rest are just not good enough IMO. I know Younis has not been in good form lately (the finger injury perhaps did not help matters) but I w'd still back him to score more runs on seaming pitches and against good pacers than Malik.
All in all a very disappointing batting performance AGAIN. 233 was very poor. NZ got home comfortably in the end with 2.1 overs to spare. With the batting powerplay still to come we needed to push the RRR to 9+ RPO but that obviously was not easy given our paltry total. Even Asif might have come in for some stick in the batting powerplay.
I agree though that Rana for Asif was a bad decision
Yes. Despite the defeat, Pakistan was awesome in this tournament. They have all the ingredients to be a really top notch team barring some frequent indisciplines.
I do not second that at this point. Pakistan's batting is just too unpredicatble, inconsistent and erratic and that is always going to be a problem in important games such as SF and Final