Scoring rate of Younis and Misbah is damaging the team – Mudassar Nazar

Pakistan’s two former opening batsmen, Mohsin Khan and Mudassar Nazar, feels that the national team should change its batting order because of the poor scoring rate of Younis Khan and Misbah-ul-Haq. Both the former cricketers have advocated the promotion of Kamran Akmal in the batting order.

The Green Shirts lost the opening fixture of the five-match One Day International (ODI) series at Bloemfontein by a massive margin of 125 runs, with the second encounter scheduled to be played tomorrow at Centurion.

Chasing a massive target of 315 runs, the visitors were off to a reasonable start by the openers, Nasir Jamshed and Mohammad Hafeez, with the duo accumulating 42 runs in just 7 overs, before the former was dismissed. However, the middle-order batsmen failed to carry on with the momentum provided by the openers and the whole team was dismissed for just 190 runs.

Younis scored 30 runs off 51 balls, which is surely not acceptable when a team is looking to score at more than 6 runs per over. Ironically, the team management opted not to play Umar Akmal, who is considered as one of the finest stroke-makers in the country.

Over the previous decade or so, Pakistan has struggled to find a stable opening partnership and Mudassar, who has coached the national team in past, said that it is because of inconsistent selection policies.

“Pakistan have not backed their opening combinations since early 2000s, and this is the main reason we have not achieved stability yet,” Nazar said. “We can stick to Hafeez and Nasir at the opening slot, but the scoring rate by Younis and Misbah is very slow and that is damaging. The No. 3 batsman is very important and at the moment I see Kamran as the best man [for the position]. Playing him at No. 6 or 7 is wasting him.”

Mohsin also believes that Kamran should be batting in the top-order so that he can provide some impetus to the innings.”Using Kamran in the middle order is ineffective,” Mohsin mentioned. “Despite being a talented batsman, he is being misused. If your top five batsmen aren’t performing, then it’s unfair to expect something big from the number six.”

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Posted by Yasir Hashmi on Mar 14 2013. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.