January 22, 2008	Tuesday	Muharram 12, 1429

KARACHI, Jan 21: Despite Pakistan’s convincing victory by 104 runs in the first match of the One-day International series on Monday, skipper Shoaib Malik said he expected Zimbabwe to put up a good fight in the remaining games.

While talking to reporters, Malik said that Zimbabwe had the capability of bouncing back. “One cannot take things for granted because any thing can happen on a given day. Today was our day. Once you have scored big runs, it’s always tough for the other side to match such a total. Zimbabwe may be lacking in experience, but they can spring a surprise,” the Pakistan captain said. “Had I won the toss, we would have obviously batted first because the pitch here was very flat.”

Malik expressed satisfaction over his own performance and said that he had fully recovered from the ankle injury that forced him to miss the final two Tests of the away series in India.

“I feel great now having run those singles and twos in this game,” Malik said. “The ankle feels fine at the moment and I didn’t feel any discomfort while either batting or bowling or fielding,” he said.

Nasir Jamshed, who was named Man-of-the-Match for his knock of 61, said he will try to learn from his mistakes after missing the chance of scoring a century on debut. “I made a mistake to get out in such a soft manner. But I learned from this experience and will try to score a hundred in the next match.”

Prosper Utseya, the Zimbabwe captain, conceded that his side was not comfortable with the idea of batting first since it lacked experience.

“Since we have a very inexperienced side we felt that fielding first after winning the toss would offer us the best chance. We are more at home in chasing the runs,” he said. “The positives from this match were the batting of [Vusi] Sibanda, [Chamu] Chibhabha and [Sean] Williams because all of them got runs here.”