Pakistan’s 2-1 defeat to Proteas in the T20 series in South Africa, that snapped their fantastic winning streak spanning eleven successive series, was primarily owing to their unimaginative bowling rather than poor batting or fielding.

Traditionally, whenever Pakistan have not been over the line, it has been either their batting or fielding that let us down. But oddly enough, both departments performed adequately in the T20 series against South Africa, especially the fielding where direct hits were a regular feature which was heartening to see.

But sadly, the bowlers never really showed any signs of improvement and were often clueless about restricting the opposition, as was the case with them in the ODI series, particularly the third and fifth ODI. The pattern of mistakes was the same in the T20 series. The bowlers kept on bowling in the strong areas of South African batsmen and were banished to all parts of the grounds.

With none of our bowlers capable of bowling anywhere near the 150kph mark, short bowling was never the thing for us to bank on and thus backfired. Our medium pacers, pitching the ball to good length most of the time, allowed the Proteas to play in their favourite arc which was frustrating to watch.

When it comes to fast bowling in the limited overs cricket, the focus ought to be on yorkers or slower balls which were hardly ever hurled at the rivals.

Our current set of fast bowlers are not skilful enough to beat the batsmen often or restrict them. Hence, when bowling at the death overs, they should have had fielders at long off and long on be right at the boundary with focus on bowling fuller lengths and cutters.

Even our spinners, apart from Imad Wasim who has been out-standing and has come of age really and kept a lid on things, were decimated during the T20s against SA.

Shadab Khan, one feels, needs to learn to bowl faster aiming on middle and leg stump and not allowi the batsmen to play the slog sweep, reverse sweep or any other cheeky shot for that matter as was observed in the 3rd ODI versus Proteas.

Normally, if a team wants to increase its chances of winning any game, it obviously plan and stick to its strengths. Shoaib Malik, who has been a seasoned player, was not prudent in his decisions when he won the toss and put the Proteas in on more than one occasion.

We all know chasing is a forte with teams like India, England and New Zealand but Pakistani batting line up often collapse while chasing and that is exactly what happened in the T20s.

Defending totals has been our strength, so why expose our batsmen to stiff targets which demand eleven to thirteen runs an over as big hitting at the back end of the innings has never been our advantage. Until and unless the wicket has moisture and encourages sideways movement, Pakistan should opt for batting first. T20 wickets are generally flat therefore whenever men in green win the toss, they should only think about putting up a total on the board and defend it.

Our batsmen also were one dimensional in their approach and refused to show any signs of improvement, messing up the run chase twice even though the asking run rate was hardly eight runs per over; they played silly shots leading to dot balls which allowed the run rate to creep to more than eleven runs and was beyond their reach. Those dot balls were played simply because of our batsmen’s inability to rotate the strike. When batsmen cannot manoeuvre the ball into the gaps then they try to hit themselves out of trouble leading to another dot ball or their prized wicket which mounts enormous pressure on the incoming batsmen.

Another problem that has cropped up is that a majority of our batsmen a failing to clear the fence on a regular basis; in fact the recent statistics have been alarming as we have been ranked among the last two teams in world cricket for their inability to hit sixes.

Pakistan have remained on top of the world T20 rankings for nearly a year now but they now need to address certain areas on war footing if they are to maintain that top spot. They must revamp their approach with some out of the box thinking or they are likely to slide down the ladder in the T20s too like they did in Tests and ODIs.

Published in Dawn, February 17th, 2019