RAWALPINDI: Fast bowler Sohail Khan, Pakistan’s top performer in domestic cricket, on Friday confirmed his fine working relationship with head coach Mickey Arthur and said that he would have been a greater player if he had been coached by the South African ten years ago.

Talking to Dawn News during the ongoing National T20 Cup in Rawalpindi, Sohail said: “Mickey has been a tough task master with me in the last two years but it is him who has polished my skills the most. He has taught me how I should work for my comeback. I have not the slightest doubt in my mind that I would have joined the ranks of great bowlers had I met Mickey ten years ago.”

However, Sohail disagreed with Arthur’s point of view that age was not on his side. “I don’t buy this logic, age doesn’t really matter if you are fit and performing well,” he said. “Almost all the players in the current team are near or about my age and I don’t think it is an issue.”

While admitting that he did have some fitness issues early this year, Sohail said he had sufficiently overcome them with hard work, a fact that is amply displayed in his performance this season. “I agree that my fitness was down in the recent past, but now I have passed the fitness test and my Yoyo test result is 19.1 which is more than satisfactory,” disclosed Sohail.

“I am fit and have been completing five rounds in five minutes and eleven seconds. This is the reason that I made a comeback against the World XI,” he added.

Sohail said that a player could not survive by playing just one format in today’s cricket and that’s that reason that he has been trying everything to establish his position in the national squad.

To his credit, Sohail, who has worked very hard on his batting as well, recently performed well with the bat during Hong Kong Super Sixes and and has a batting average of 25 in Test cricket.

“I want to prove myself like Misbah-ul-Haq, Younis Khan, Mohammad Hafeez and Shoaib Malik have done and want to serve the game for a longer period of time like them,” he said.

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2017