Babar Azam continues to score his own 50-60 runs and the team doesn’t benefit from that at all: Danish Kaneria

Former Pakistan leg spinner Danish Kaneria has urged the Pakistan batters to up their game instead of only relying on skipper Babar Azam to perform single-handedly in all the matches. At the same time, he has also said that Babar only focuses on his individual performance by scoring runs for himself instead of the team’s cause.

Kaneria’s critical remarks came after Pakistan’s 1-2 ODI series loss to New Zealand at home earlier this month. The Men in Green who had registered a convincing six-wicket victory in the first game completely lost the plot from there on and ended up conceding the series.

It was Pakistan’s collective batting failure that let them down in the second and the third game as the batters failed to click as a unit.

We heavily depend on Babar Azam in all three formats: Babar Azam

“If you see this Indian team, they are full of match winners. But on the Pakistan side, we heavily depend on Babar Azam in all three formats, and he only scores for himself. Babar Azam continues to score his own 50-60 runs and the team doesn’t benefit from that at all, and it’s just causing losses. Babar never scores for the team’s cause,” Kaneria said on his YouTube channel.

“We don’t have a bowler of Shoaib Akhtar’s calibre who threatens to take wickets all the time. We don’t have imposing openers like Saeed Anwar, Aamir Sohail, Imran Farhat, Taufeeq Umar, and Salman Butt.  Our middle order used to be packed with the likes of Mohammad Yousuf, Younis Khan, and Inzamam-ul-Haq. We had a great all-rounder in Abdul Razzaq. Teams used to fear us in the ODIs, but it’s not the case anymore,” he added.

At the same time, the leggie also talked about Pakistan’s inability to exploit home conditions to their advantage quite similar to arch-rivals India who have registered back-to-back ODI series victories on home soil this month against Sri Lanka and New Zealand.

“Did we make any big score of note in the ODIs? Did anyone score double hundred? Was there any dominant performance? No. We need to realize all this and learn from other countries like India who are exploiting their conditions. But here we are afraid of getting exposed in our own conditions,” the cricketer-turned-YouTuber said.

While Babar Azam did score a match-winning 66 in the first ODI and a valiant 79 in the second, he failed to make his bat do the talking in the series decider as he walked back to the pavilion after scoring a painstaking four runs of 13 deliveries.

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