Sarfraz’s baptism by fire
dubai — It wasn’t the most ideal start to his tenure as Test captain and a series loss, the first at home since 2007 and here in the UAE since 2010, is something Sarfraz Ahmed will have to live with.
It was a proud record his predecessor Misbah-ul-Haq had built over the years. But Sarfraz now has a unwanted statistic, for no fault of his.
Pakistan were found wanting across the two Tests in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Sarfraz, who was handed the captaincy in all three formats of the game, is still learning the ropes when it comes to the longer format.
“I got to learn a lot. We made many mistakes in the series. This was my first series as captain and it was pretty tough. Captaincy is very different in Tests – changes session by session. The toss is very important in Tests, especially in Asia,” Sarfraz said after the second Test in Dubai.
“But even after losing the toss, we managed to get close to them but just couldn’t win it. We lacked in our batting, we didn’t play any long innings, didn’t capitalize on good starts. The kind of innings Asad (Shafiq) played, if we had gotten that in the last game, or in the first innings here, then we could’ve gotten out of it. I learnt a fair bit and I hope that whatever the next series is, we’ll try and improve on these,” he added.
Traditionally, Pakistan have always gone in with two specialist spinners here but this was the first time they went in with only one spinner and three pacers.
And that was a glaring error that stood out and it was something that Pakistan got it wrong. Sri Lanka had two spinners in left-arm spinner Rangana Herath and off-spinner Dilruwan Perera, and the pair shared 28 wickets between them. Pakistan’s lone spinner Yasir Shah had 16.
“You could say we should’ve played two spinners here but the bigger problems we got were from the batting areas. They made 400, we still made 400 against them. You could say we’ve played and won with two spinners here before but, at the moment, we felt our fast bowling was more experienced,” he said.
“We had Hasan (Ali), we had (Mohammad) Amir and hoped they would do well. But we didn’t get the wickets – their fast bowlers bowled better than us and we should give them credit for that. They hit the right areas and took wickets at just the right time. I think more than the bowling, the difference was our batting,” added Sarfraz.
Sarfraz also defended the batting order, especially the openers, which had to be tweaked following Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan’s retirements.
“As such, I don’t think we faced difficulties because of the openers. Both openers gave us a good start in the first match but the thing is we couldn’t convert those scores. In the first innings got 50s but got out back to back,” explained Sarfraz.
“Our plan was to push Azhar (Ali) to the middle-order, where he has succeeded — Pakistan’s success has come from the middle over the years. Azhar had a great year as an opener but we felt we need to strengthen our middle order. But I think in this series, we faced problems in our batting. We made fifties, but we didn’t convert and we missed big partnerships. That is why we lost,” he felt.