Young Pakistani pacers can rattle Australians: Wasim Khan

The PCB Chief Executive said we have seen the likes of Musa, Shaheen, Naseem in the team.

ISLAMABAD (APP) – Pakistan Cricket Board Chief Executive Wasim Khan hopes Pakistani young bowlers would rattle the Australians in the upcoming Tests and Twenty20 series beginning next month in Australia.

Pakistan would play Australia in two Tests in Brisbane (November 21 to 25) and Adelaide (November 29 to December 3) while the three T20s are scheduled for November 3, 5 and 8.

“We have seen the likes of Musa Khan, Shaheen Afridi, Naseem Shah in the team. It was critical for us to do something different in the squads. But if you do the same thing, you get the same results,” Pakpassion.net quoted Wasim as saying.

He said it was important to take young guys who have a point to prove, who have no baggage and were coming in fresh. “There was nothing to lose and when you are young, you don’t care about who you were playing against, you just want to make your mark,” he said and added you won’t win with medium pacers in Australia.

However, Wasim was of the view that players fail when they go to places like Australia, because the wickets in domestic cricket were not good enough. “We need to improve the wickets as there has to maintain balance between bat and ball,” he said.

He said domestic cricket needed to be televised as much. “We have around 75 days of televised cricket lined up over the next three years. PCB has approached a lot of sponsors who were keen to get involved next year. PCB was spending a billion rupees, funding this domestic structure. It was important to get sponsors on board, and then we can put more into players’ wages and the more they can improve. What we pay to the players now would look very different in three to five years with sponsors on board pumping money into domestic cricket,” he said.

Wasim said hopefully Sri Lanka would confirm playing two Tests against Pakistan here. “We have revamped the coaching structure with a dual role for Misbah ul Haq of a Head Coach and Chief Selector which had been operating in New Zealand for 7 years and has gone well,” he said.

He said Nadeem Khan was also brought in as a selector coordinator, he would be under Misbah. “People expect instant results and success. We lost the T20s against Sri Lanka but we won the ODIs. We were quick to forget, give the guy an opportunity.

It was a new look side and a new look structure. We have got Waqar Younis back, Yasir Malik has taken over as the strength and conditioning coach,” he said.

Wasim said we have got a two year cycle with a Test Championship, two T20 World Cups and an Asia Cup. “We need to aim to be there at Lord’s for the final of the Test Championship. The brand of cricket we were going to play in Test cricket would be slightly different. We were going to go through ups and downs, but I think we need to be fair to Misbah and what the coaching team was trying to do. Not everything would be right the first time but we were confident we would get things right with this,” he said.