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| February 18, 2006 | Saturday | Muharram 19, 1427 |
ODI series loss a wake-up call, warns Woolmer
KARACHI, Feb 17: Pakistan’s one-day series defeat to India is the wake-up call the team needs, coach Bob Woolmer says. After winning the Test series and the first one-dayer in Peshawar, Pakistan lost the next three games to surrender the series. The last match is scheduled for Sunday in Karachi.
“In a way it is good this has happened now. It allows us to identify the areas where we need to further improve on. It would not be ideal for us to face this situation closer to the next World Cup,” Woolmer said on Friday.
“No one likes to lose but now we know what we have to do to lift ourselves. One can try to put a finger on the areas we need to improve and we can start at Karachi.
“One thing we have to work on is how to quickly adapt to both Test and one-day cricket in a short span of time. I think in this series we had too much focus on the tests and didn’t adopt quickly enough for the one-dayers.”
Woolmer said he was heartened that Pakistan had stayed close to India in the one-day series despite being on the losing end.
“It’s a case of us not grabbing the opportunities or not doing some basic things correctly.”
Woolmer said the loss of form by key performers had also hurt Pakistan.
“You can accept players being out with injuries but it it is different dealing with players who have done well in the past struggling for form. You have to stand by them,” he added.
Woolmer defended the shuffling of the batting order as part of modern one-day cricket.
“You have to use every player according to the situation. What people fail to realise is that unlike test cricket there is not much difference between the teams .... in one-day cricket and on a given day any team can win.”—Reuters
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