Malik Would’ve Been A Better Choice As Pak T20I Captain Than Azam: Afridi

TPI Staff October 22, 2019

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Mumbai: After a disastrous loss of 3-0 in T20I’s to Srilanka in home condition there were already alarm bells ringing, Sarfaraz Ahmed was sacked as captain of T20 and Test by PCB. Azhar Ali is named as the test captain and Babar Azam is named as T20 captain.

Coach cum selector Misbah-ul-Haq was reportedly unhappy with Sarfaraz approach towards the game. As a result, he has been dropped from the side who is going to tour Australia in upcoming matches.

Former captain and Pakistani all-rounder Shahid Afridi is not quite happy on the appointment of Babar Azam captain of the T20 side. He feels, Pakistan is ICC’s number-one ranked T20I team and is being deemed as one of the strong contenders to win the championship next year and that’s the reason it would have been better to make Shoaib Malik the skipper in the shortest format at least until the 2020 T20 World Cup in Australia.

On his YouTube channel, he says, “no doubt Babar Azam is the backbone of the team, he is a consistent performer. However, given that the T20I World Cup is coming up, giving the T20I captaincy to Shoaib Malik would have been a more sensible move. The best move would have been to appoint Shoaib Malik as captain till the World Cup”.

Being captain in the seventh edition of the Caribbean Premier League (CPL). Under his leadership, the Guyana Amazon Warriors won 11 matches in a row and slumped only in the final versus the Barbados Tridents at the Brian Lara Stadium, Tarouba in Trinidad.

He was also one of their top performers with the bat in hand. At the international level, Malik has played 111 T20I in which he has scored 2,263 runs at an average of 30.58 with seven half-centuries. Back in July 2019, he retired from ODI cricket after the World Cup in England.

Shoaib in his career of 111 T20I matches, he has captained Pakistan in 20 T20Is and has 13 victories under his belt. The last time he led was in the three-match away series versus South Africa in February 2019 that the visitors lost 1-2. Malik also was the skipper in 41 ODIs out of which Pakistan won 25.

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