I just want to have a discussion on Pakistani team and its preparation of upcoming worldcup 2022 in Aus.
Nowhere is Pak ready to do something great. There is no middle order, like literally nothing. It feels like when openers are out, the tailenders are in for batting.
Khushdil, Asif, Haider Ali etc.. are utterly disappointment.
Now we’ve reached to a point where again there are talks of bringing back Shoaib Malik and umar akmal
Our only hope is bowling. Shaheen, Naseem, Haris & Shadab should be a formidable combination.
But, they can't do much without the batting, which is pathetic except for the openers.
Pakistan entered the world cup with lot of hidden (yet obvious) problems in hand.
They had kept (almost) the same team which they selected for Asia cup and it turned out to be a bad choice.
They were out there for T20 worldcup and instead of having solid batsmen, they relied on three pinch hitters
(a) Asif Ali
(b) Hyder
(c) Khushdil
Turned out all three were good for nothing. Khushdil was badly exposed as the "Parchi" in the home series against England, yet he continued to be a part of Asia cup team, NZ tour and eventually world cup.
And then there were two mystery characters
(a) Iftikhar
(b) Nawaz
Although they were not as bad as the so-called pinch hitters but they proved to be an epic failures in big matches. I always thought Nawaz was a good talent but seeing his "above-waist" noball in the last over against India, his weaknesses were like anybody's guess. He could never perform with the bat or ball.
Shan Masood turned out to be OK.
Haris needs a lot of mentoring but he truely has a potential to become a player like Hardhick Pandiya
One thing Pakistani management needs to understand is that there are different levels of players. Some perform good at domestic but cant play international at all. Some may be good at international but are confined to sub-continent/UAE pitches. World cups is a whole different domain. They need to groom players for that.
Next big event is 2023 One-day tournament. Now is the time they start prepping up. And they do need solid batsmen not just some random guy having few hits.
And for bowling, they do the best they can. They play their heart out. Its very unfair with them when batsmen dont do their part or when poor fielding leds to the loss.
Anyway, since there were so many similarities with 1992 World Cup I really didn’t wanted Pakistan to win lest that gives any ideas to Babar Azam to go into politics.