Urooj Mumtaz pins Pakistan defeat on Rizwan’s laborious innings that seen him score just 46 runs in 77 deliveries.
Urooj Mumtaz has pinned Pakistan’s 6-wicket loss to India in the Champions Trophy squarely on Pakistan skipper Muhammad Rizwan.
The Pakistan skipper started his innings with a stunning sweep off the first ball, but then just kept consuming dot ball after dot ball. At one point Rizwan was on 18 of 49 balls, with just 14 singles of the next 48 balls he faced.
The pitch was not a minefield by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, this pitch was much better to bat on compared to the pitch used for India’s game against Bangladesh. But Rizwan was just not able to score runs. It felt like he was absolutely against hitting an aggressive shot at all.
At one point between overs 11-24, Rizwan played out an astounding 29 dot balls out of the 45 deliveries he faced, scoring just 16 runs without a single boundary.
His painstaking innings finally came to an end when he yorked himself to a seemingly harmless Axar Patel delivery, making a mess of his stumps in the process.
Former Pakistan women’s skipper Mumtaz pulled no punches while putting Rizwan’s performance under the microscope for his snail-like innings.
“Rizwan, time and again, is at fault of chewing up too many dot deliveries. Then there is one release shot that comes out,” she said on ESPNcricinfo Match Day. “He was on 40-odd from something like 70 deliveries at the point where he looked like taking another release shot. He was 30 off 68 [24 off 53] at one point when he hit that one four. Saud [Shakeel], on the other hand, is not the normal aggressor; it is Rizwan who is normally the aggressor when he does get going and does get set.”
“I think Rizwan, in his 46 off 77 – strike rate of 59 – just wasn’t good enough because we’re talking about a team where the best batter in the team [Babar Azam] is obviously out of form, hasn’t been churning out those big runs… and he got out early,” Mumtaz said.
“Imam [had] that unfortunate run-out. So it was down to Rizwan as captain to put his hand up and show that brave attitude. Maybe even not just trying to botch everything down, but maybe just better strike rotation, [the lack of] which I thought was a massive fault, and probably applied a little bit more pressure on Saud as well.”