Follow UsThe 2023 World Cup dream is all but over for Pakistan and Babar Azam. With New Zealand defeating Sri Lanka by a massive margin on Wednesday, the Men in Green will now have to beat England by 287 runs on Saturday (November 11) to take their NRR above New Zealand’s. If Pakistan end up batting second, they will have to chase whatever the target is inside three overs. Both these scenarios look next to impossible but Babar still wants to give it a shot.
“There is one match left. You never know. Its cricket - we will try to finish on a good note and then see. I think the South African match cost us and we should have won that match, but unfortunately, we didn't win that because of which we are at this stage. There should be hope at all times. At any stage, at any work you do, you should have positive hope and I firmly believe in that,” said Babar before the England game in Kolkata.
“We will try to execute our plans and how we will go tomorrow and how we will achieve the target. We can't just go in and start firing blindly – we want that but with proper planning, how we want to play the first 10 overs, then the next 20 – how we have to achieve that target. There are a lot of things in this, like partnership, which player will stay on the pitch for how long. If you ask me, I would say if Fakhar is in the match for 20 or 30 overs, we can achieve that. Then follow up with Rizwan, Iftikhar. We can do this and we have planned for this.”
Pakistan have been very inconsistent in all three departments and Babar wants his team to learn from past mistakes. “You cannot say that it is the fault of bowling, fielding, or batting. As a team, we could not execute. We cannot say that we got so many runs in bowling or lost runs in fielding. As a team, we did not execute the plan or play as per the demand – that includes bowling, batting, and fielding.
“We will try to learn from this, because the faster you learn from big events you know where you have made mistakes. I have seen that the margin of error is very low here. Because when you give even a little room to any team, they take the match from you. This is the specialty of the World Cup. It's a high-intensity game. You have a match against every team, so they are high-intensity games. So, I think the whole team should learn from the mistakes.”
Babar’s own form hasn’t been great. The right-hander has scored 282 runs at an average of 40.28 and a strike rate of 82.69, but these are not the numbers you expect from a batter of his caliber. He has four fifties in this tournament but not once has he managed to touch the 100-run mark.
“My goal was to get a good finish in the batting. I didn't have a goal to score 50 or 100. The main thing was to make the team win. The performance that helps the team, not my individual performance. I played slow, I played fast, depending on the situation. I play according to the situation and according to what my team needs,” explained Babar
“What is my plan? What is the team requiring from me? What do I require from the team? And we execute the plan accordingly. Sometimes you play slow and sometimes you play fast. Sometimes the conditions don't favour you to play fluently. Sometimes you have to try and hang in, fight it out and take the game deep.
“There are three phases here. You get runs with the new ball. When you come in the middle, you have to struggle a little. But it is not that you get these same things in every venue. You get different situations in different venues. We came here for the first time, we didn't have the awareness of how to take it, but we adapted as soon as possible.
“Because as I said, in the middle and end you get runs. In the middle overs when the ball is old, you struggle a bit – as a batsman. That’s it, I wanted to give a good performance here, I had high expectations but I couldn’t perform as per expectations. I accept that.”
There has also been question marks over his captaincy. “I have been captaining my team for the last three years and I have never felt this way. It’s just because I have not performed the way I should have in the World Cup, that’s why people are saying that I am under pressure. I am under no pressure. I have been doing this for the last 2.5 or 3 years. I was the one who was performing and I was the one who was the captain.
“It depends on how you take such thing. Everyone has their own point of view, their own way of thinking. Everyone is saying something different. He should be like this, or like that. If someone has to give me advice, everyone has my number. It is easy to give advice on TV. If you want to give me some advice, you can message me. I don't think I was under any pressure or felt any different because of this. I try to give my best in the field during the fielding. During batting, I think about how I should make runs and make the team win.”