Sports

No need to panic, stresses Arthur

By Our Correspondent

October 15, 2023

KARACHI: Mickey Arthur, the man at the helm of Pakistan’s World Cup campaign, on Saturday said that his team won’t press the panic button in the wake of a seven-wicket hammering at the hands of arch-rivals India.

Pakistan crashed to a big defeat against India after managing just 191 runs despite being placed at 155-2 at one point in time in their big World Cup game in Ahmedabad on Saturday. India cruised to victory with 117 balls to spare. The one-sided result resulted in scathing attacks directed at Babar Azam and his men.

While acknowledging that his team flopped in the match, Arthur stressed that there was still a long way to go in the World Cup in which Pakistan has six more games to play in the league stages of the event.

“We’re two from three, So there’s certainly no panic yet. We’ll go back and we’ll analyze this game. We’ll talk to our players. We’ll have conversations about how we want to go forward. Australia’s our next game. We’ll have conversations about them. We’ll look at conditions, and then we’ll make a selection decision based on our strategy and conditions for the next game,” he told reporters after Saturday’s match.

Arthur believes the one-sided atmosphere at the Narendra Modi Stadium where there were no Pakistani fans because of visa delays also played a role in his team’s defeat.

“It didn’t seem like an ICC event to be brutally honest. It seemed like a bilateral series; it seemed like a BCCI event. I didn’t hear Dil Dil Pakistan coming through the microphones too often tonight,” he said. “But I’m not going to use that as an excuse because for us it was about living the moment, it was about the next ball and it was about how we were going to combat the Indian players tonight,” he added. Arthur was baffled the way Pakistan collapses after posting 155-2. “I would have liked us to really take the game on just a little bit more. It’s a massive occasion, as we know, but I think we just went into our shells just a little bit.

And to go from 155 for two, if it was, to 190-odd all out is just not on. Yeah, credit to India, I thought they bowled really well, but I just thought our performance was just a little bit timid,” “I thought we were a little bit timid. I did think we could probably have taken on the Indian spinners just a little bit more. It was a wicket that didn’t turn massively, and I thought we needed to put some pressure back. But again, they were building and building nicely. I think we’ve got to realize that there are two ways to always skin a cat. And we’ve had success by taking it deep and then cashing in at the back end.

That’s been our style, that’s been our brand, but we didn’t play the Pakistan Way tonight, and that was the disappointing aspect of it for me,” he said. Commenting on some of the struggling players including key pacer Shaheen Shah Afridi and all-rounder Shadab Khan, Arthur mentioned that they are working on improving their confidence and addressing technical aspects behind the scenes.

“We’ve been doing a little bit of work behind the scenes. Look, it’d be remiss of me to discuss it out here, but we’ve been doing some work with them. For me, it’s just about confidence. The key for us now is getting our players to remain calm. It’s getting our players to focus on the next game, and it’s to build them up and make sure that they go into that next game thinking they can run through a brick wall,” he said.

Score Board

India won the toss

Pakistan Innings

Shafique lbw b Siraj 20

Imam c Rahul b Pandya 36

Azam b Siraj 50

Rizwan b Bumrah 49

Shakeel lbw b Kuldeep 6

Ahmed b Kuldeep 4

Khan b Bumrah 2

Nawaz c Bumrah b Pandya 4

Ali c Gill b Jadeja 12