Pakistan skipper Masood lambasts bowlers for poor effort after their harrowing loss to England in the first test.
Pakistan skipper Masood minced no words in condemning the effort of his bowlers after the defeat to England.
The hosts lost by an innings and 47 runs in the first of the three-match series. This despite posting a score of 556 in their first innings.
Masood, however refrained from putting his batting unit in the line of fire.
The skipper spoke about his side’s inability to take all 10 wickets in their bowling effort. For context, Jack Leach took 7 wickets in the test, which is the same as the entire Pakistan bowling.
“What England showed us is you can find a way. They took 20 wickets on this pitch, so you can’t say it’s impossible to take 20 wickets here. “We can’t find the easy way out to those 20 wickets, because then we wouldn’t have scored a huge first-innings score. You have to find a way as a team, and the formula of Test cricket is you can’t win a Test without taking 20 wickets. That, and first-innings runs.
“We’ve repeated mistakes, by setting up the match and then letting those positions slip. When you score 550 and bat for two days, there’s a human element where there is scoreboard pressure. If in these conditions you are to set up a game, you put up a big score. And then not let the team take too big a lead.”
The calmness of the surface has dominated much of the broader conversation. Chris Woakes described the surface as “a pitch that offered bu****r all” after he dismissed Babar Azam in the first innings and stumped Abdullah Shafique with the opening ball of the second. If Masood had gone the other way and lined up behind them to clear his bowlers, he would have faced minimal opposition.
“It was the same pitch for both sides, and both sides were similar – three pacers and two spinners,” he said. “They found a way, and we didn’t execute as well. Conditions change over the course of a Test, and we have to learn to find a way.
“We take the discussion of the pitch too seriously. You plan a pitch for your squad and your strategy, but you can’t control every aspect of the pitch. The last Test we played here in 2022, that was a slightly different pitch. England’s squad was different, as was ours. Here, we expected this pitch to break up very quickly. Maybe around the end of Day 2 and the start of Day 3. Which is why we tried to prolong the innings.”
“We have to look at the batting and bowling effort and how to combine them, and stay in the game. The third and fourth innings will only be match-winning when the bowling and batting innings are in tandem”