In this space last week, I had talked about a few of the proposals I have made to the Patron of Pakistan Cricket Board regarding the national team’s preparation for the World Cup, which, of course, is the highest reward in the shorter version of the game. I wish to continue in that vein today.
Apart from ensuring a settled batting order and supreme physical fitness — two of the main items that we discussed last week — there is one key element that in my view needs to be drilled into the minds of all concerned. The team management will do well to make a start right away in that direction. The moment a mention is made of the One Day game, it is only natural that images of wham-bam cricket start coming to mind. Pakistan will do well to plan it in a somewhat different manner.
It is customary for teams to press the One Day mode as we come closer to the World Cup. While it has its own merits, Pakistan is a team that needs to take it a bit differently. I had recently given the break-up of all the One Day games that have been played thus far, and the readers would remember that it is Pakistan itself that has played the highest number of such games in the world. So, as it is, Pakistan suffers from excessive One Day exposure and even approaches Test matches like one-dayers, with players indulging in cross-bated shots that often do not come good.
What needs to be reminded to the players time and again is that the main requirement in any form of cricket is to stick to the basics. There have been several occasions when the team has been dismissed inside the 50 overs because of the inability of players to last that long once the top order has been removed. Observe lading teams playing the game, and you would notice that one-dayers and cross-batted shots do not necessarily go together all the time.
The team management would do well to use Test matches from now till the World Cup, especially those against India, England and South Africa, to inculcate batting discipline in the team. This, in my view, shall be a vital part of our World Cup preparations. If our key players develop the tendency to play their normal game instead of being unnecessarily adventurous, the team certainly has the potential to make it big when it matters. The World Cup may be some distance at present, but the time to start inculcating the habit is now.
One final aspect in this regard is more administrative than cricketing. At the last World Cup, the team was camped in South Africa much in advance in the hope that it would have a better chance of acclimatization which, in turn, would have helped it perform better when the main fare started. What happened was totally contrary, and the team performed much worse than it had done in any previous World Cup campaign.
This probably had something to do with unnecessarily prolonged stay abroad of the team, especially after the team had just toured Zimbabwe and South Africa a little while ago. This time round as well, the team is scheduled to tour South Africa a month before the World Cup in the West Indies. It would be advisable to let the boys re-charge their energies on return from South Africa so that they may peak at the desired time, and may not have tired bodies and stale minds when it matters the most. ON the one hand, we will have fresh minds and bodies to launch an effective campaign, while on the other the chances of any infighting will be minimized, which otherwise are a natural outcome of prolonged stays abroad.
The weather in the West Indies, especially Jamaica where Pakistan would be based, is more or less the same as we have here, and that also minimizes the need for any lengthy acclimatization.
In this space last week, I had talked about a few of the proposals I have made to the Patron of Pakistan Cricket Board regarding the national team’s preparation for the World Cup, which, of course, is the highest reward in the shorter version of the game. I wish to continue in that vein today.
It is customary for teams to press the One Day mode as we come closer to the World Cup. While it has its own merits, Pakistan is a team that needs to take it a bit differently. I had recently given the break-up of all the One Day games that have been played thus far, and the readers would remember that it is Pakistan itself that has played the highest number of such games in the world. So, as it is, Pakistan suffers from excessive One Day exposure and even approaches Test matches like one-dayers, with players indulging in cross-bated shots that often do not come good.
