Theexcptions being Budhi Kundaran and Farookh Engineer, both of the swashbuckling variety.
really bad defeat in 2.5 days..any way, the same team won the last test match, so let this young team settle down. they bond well and they want to win and that is a very good sign.
there are however serious strategic mistakes in our selection :
- shadab is a pretty pathetic test match bowler…useless, he bowled so many loose full tosses. very little variety and not consistent with length. he is simply not ready for the test match bowling yet but he bats well and he is an amazing fielder plus infuses a lot of energy to the team. that being said, we need a match winning spinner and shadab is not that bowler. PERIOD
2)our opening continues to be a total mess. azhar shd not open. he shd come one down which is his natural position. imam ul haq is ok, too early to yel at him but chances are not his favor. why? because in principal, if a player average less than 40 in our first class, how can you expect him to score above 40 in competitive test matches? simple as that
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we cannot go with 5 batsmen. our batting is horrible and we are going with 5 regular batsmen? come on. pretty idiotic as if we have gordon gredinge, desmond haynes, viv richards, and clive lyod in top 5!!! and sarfraz is just a hit or miss, mostly a miss especially outside UAE.
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and of 5 bowlers we have, 2 are kind of part timers. hassan ali, faheem ashraf. they have never bowled long spells. they are at best ODI bowlers, at least for now. so we are trying to play test cricket with part timers? they can bat a bit, bowl a bit but test match requires specialization. you need solid 7 batsmen and 4 solid full time bowlers.
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sarfraz never impressed me and will never impress me. not a captain material. takes rash decisions, plays stupid shots at wrong time all the time, and a horrible communicator.
and arthur is strategically a mess and i have been saying it since we toured NZ. all the points i raised above, he shd know but he is dumb. he can do tactical stuff but strategically, ZERO.
but overall, i do like this team.they all want to win, they are friends, they have energy. we just need to strategically tune this team better
^ Sarfraz actually said:
"
?It’s disappointing that we had a chance to win the series but unfortunately we didn’t play well here.?
I love the leader who stand behind their team against outsiders. We know he yells at his players for a misfield or dropped catch. But thats a captain we need who unites the team.
If you dont like Sarfraz even after winning CT despite the first loss against India, you are simply a hater and wont ever like him no matter wut he does.
O btw, Sarfraz, the parchi, caught behind 5 targets in the only England inning. But remember he is just a parchi. Kamran Akmal would have got all 10 easily and scored a couple of centuries as well.
sarfraz is so poor that every time only a bad example like kamran would justify his place 
Afridi ka dewana gya sarfraz ka aa gya
^Perfect trolling! We need some on GS these days
Agreed :k:
Potentially he will score 50+ or even a 100 against BD/SL/Zim but not against good teams and not in challenging conditions!
Instead of Faheem they should’ve gone with Rahat Ali
See evaluating this test is a no-brainer.
All started with a bad decision after winning toss. The team management either miscalculated or were over-confident on batsmen.
And then when the top & middle order struggle to put up 100 runs combined, not once but twice, there is hardly anything else you can blame on. Its very simple. You gotto give something to bowlers to begin with. In first test, same thing happened with English bowlers.
And Pakistan desperately missed a specialized leg-spinner. Actually this point was raised by Osman Samiuddin in Cricinfo right in the beginning of this series. It turned out to be a nightmare fact in the end.
I think you are on to something here, Sid pra