Team on right track despite less-than-ideal results: Misbah

Head coach Misbah-ulHaq said that the Pakistan cricket team's slip from the number one spot to number four in the T20 rankings was a consequence of a string of failures long before he took the charge. Misbah, at a press conference in Lahore, reviewed the team's recent tour of England and addressed several other topics.

"Of course, the team was number one but if you recall, when I came even then the team was on a losing streak. The team had already lost in South Africa, England and other places.

The slide had already begun and everyone knows why that was. "Some of our players were out of form.

Fakhar Zaman, Shadab Khan and then Hasan Ali, the main contributors to our rise up the ranking, when they went into a slump the team also felt that dip. We're trying to take these and new boys back towards that level."

Misbah's charges left it until their last match of the England tour to get their first and only win, and while that result might not silence his critics, the man himself says he's satisfied with the direction the team's taking under him. "There is always room for improvement. Yes, the current results may not be what's desired but overall the process is up to my satisfaction and it seems that we are on the right track," he said.

However, Misbah asked critics to go light on the team's young pace battery, saying that mistakes made as seen in the first Test defeat are part of the learning curve and inevitable.