Skipper Dhoni given Man of the Match award to boost his morale?

[GoldenAsif]

Re: Skipper Dhoni given Man of the Match award to boost his morale?

I have no issue with Dhoni getting the MoM in 1st ODI. I would have given it to him as well. Without him there would have been no contest at all

Imran Khan won the MoM award in his comeback match despite Pakistan losing that game. Our pathetic batters could not even chase 125

HowSTAT! ODI Scorecard

@GoldenAsif

Small run chases can be tricky. It was disappointing that we could not win from that position (113/3) but these things happen in cricket. I thought India bowled and fielded very well

It is not just Pakistan but also other teams who have had problems with low run chases in the past. West Indies could not chase 183 against India in the 1983 World Cup Final (it was a 60 over game!). And in the mid-80s Pakistan lost to India at Sharjah despite restricting them to 125. Imran Khan’s 6/14 (It was his come-back game) was in vain

Pakistan have had the same problem in test cricket recently (Galle test v SLA 2009 collapsed to 117 all out chasing 168 for victory, Sydney test 2010 collapsed to 139 chasing 176 for victory)

Once you have dismissed the opposition cheaply, you should be saying to yourself as a team ‘let’s go & get these runs at a reasonable rate, say in 40 overs’. You should n’t be thinking about batting the full 50 overs or leaving it till the last overs.

Pak batsmen just don’t rotate the strike well. We either have good hitters (UA, Jamshed) or tuk tuk players (Younis, Misbah and Malik). Too often they go into their shells and fail to keep the scoreboard moving, thus putting more pressure upon themselves. They make the target seem more difficult than it actually is with their overcautious approach. This is what exactly happened with Younis (attempted an expansive drive instead of playing the ball on merit because runs were hard to come by) and Umar Akmal (was unnecessarily stumped in the final PP over). One could see it coming. One could almost sense in that final PP over that UA would do something stupid soon. He should have realised that the RRR was still a very manageable under 4 RPO. Both crumbled under pressure.

Anyways we shouldn’t be too critical, there are definitely areas in which we need to improve but overall the team exceeded our expectations.