Re: Current Pakistani Team and its Fielding
We don't need 11 Rhodes, neither are we ever going to have 11 athletic fielders in our team.
We do know that Shoaib Malik and Imran Farhat are excellent fielders and even they had problems in the 5th ODI again India, because when things go wrong, everything goes wrong. The last ODI was an ugly nightmare, let's leave it at that.
Unfortunately there has always been a perception that Pakistan and India are bad at fielding, and no amount of good fielding displays have changed that perception. One bad match, and it's claimed that we are the worst in the world. The same isn't true for other teams though, remember Paksitan's tour to Australia last year? They couldn't hold on to the simplest of catches, dropping as many as four simple slip catches in one match, yet they were just 'having an off day'.
Our younger players (except Danish) are energetic, atheltic and generally are very good at fiedling. When team isn't demoralized, the older players aren't too bad either. In fact, Mohd Yousuf will probably hit the stumps 9 out of 10 attempts.
One misfield by a player often ruins the goodwork done by the other fielders leading to this perception that we are still horrible at fielding. There's always room for improvement, and we should continue to improve in all aspects of the game, including our fielding, but we shouldn't the last match be representative of our fielding abilities.
To quote Donald Rumsfeld, we have to fight wars with the army we have, not with the army we want. It is the job of the captain to identify the strong and weak fielders and place them accordingly. It's Inzi who needs to understand that he can't place people like Danish Kaneria at positions such as point/short midwicket etc.
That said, someone does need to work with Danish Kaneria day and night untill it becomes his second nature to cleanly catch and collect the ball.