Re: Pakistan vs India at Birmingham ICC Champions Trophy 4th June 2017
EB I respect your opinion. I don’t hate Misbah myself (He is after all the captain of Islamabad United!) but I principally blame him for the pathetic way we approach batting in ODIs these days. When I look around I see all other teams incl. Bangladesh batting with a flair that is glaringly missing from our top batsmen. Yes it is not all Misbah’s fault but there is not a single exciting batsman in the present team, not a single big hitter either. This pathetic timid go-slow batting style needs to be shelved for good. All we are producing is dot ball specialists (Shehzad and Hafeez the main culprits). Even BD’s batsmen were quite innovative against England the other day.
Do not want to derail this thread but when we say that Misbah did this and that with a mediocre set of players we must also not forget that he was largely up against mediocre test teams during his time barring South Africa and England & India to a certain extent. Agreed it is definitely not the same as playing at home but UAE pitches are not very dissimilar to subcontinental pitches. Even so Misbah’s record as captain outside his comfort zone (UAE) is not that good. 0-3 in South Africa, 0-3 in Australia (agreed we have traditionally struggled down under, so he’s not alone), 0-1 in NZ (Misbah missed the 2nd test), even struggled to beat Windies B team 2-1 recently. the 2-2 in England was a commendable achievement for sure. Yes Pak beat England 3-0 and Australia 2-0 in UAE but the current Australian test team also lost 0-4 in India and 0-3 in Sri Lanka. They are clueless on spinning tracks.
Yes Misbah won 26 tests but he also lost a whopping 19 as captain. Win/loss ratio is a much more relevant stat. Imran and Miandad played against much better teams, arguably the greatest team in cricket’s entire history (Windies) and the best Indian batting line-up in my book. Even so both Miandad and Imran’s W/L ratio is better than Misbah’s. Give both Imran and Miandad these same mediocre Pak players, these same average to above average opposition teams and 40 odd tests as captain in UAE and then see what they can achieve.
And under Imran’s captaincy Pakistan whitewashed Australia 3-0 at home in 1982 (Kim Hughes was the captain and that team had some of the greatest names in history, Allan Border, Rodney Marsh and Jeff Thomson)