KARACHI
\nPakistan\u2019s ace pacer and ODI team captain Shaheen Afridi has missed the country\u2019s previous two major tours of the West Indies and England.
\nHe was in good form but was overlooked for those series. He has also not been drafted in the Test squad for the home series against Sri Lanka which will begin soon.
\nHe is now eyeing a return to Test cricket and expressed this desire at a news conference after guiding his side to a title-winning triumph in the ODI tri-series, which concluded at Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore on Saturday night.
\n\u201cI cannot say anything about the board\u2019s decisions. As far as Test cricket and T20 cricket are concerned, I want to make a comeback to Test cricket. For this, I am going to play a first-class game for FATA.
\nThere are still many areas for improvement, and I will work towards making a comeback,\u201d Shaheen told reporters.
\nShaheen used his experience and led from the front in the ODI tri-series, finishing with ten wickets, the second highest wicket-taker of the series.
\nShaheen said there was a long way to go and that a couple of wins should not satisfy the team.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s good that Pakistan had some good moments. There is still more tough cricket ahead, with the Asia Cup and a series against England in England. One or two wins should not satisfy us. We have to win more series and matches, InshaAllah,\u201d Shaheen said.
\n\u201cIn the home series against Ireland, we will try to add more new players to the Shaheens team,\u201d he said.
\nShaheen said that if players were backed, good performances would follow.
\n\u201cPlayers should be backed. Big decisions about players should not be taken on the basis of failures in one or two series. Fakhar Zaman is a big example. He did not score in the first four matches, but he is the kind of player who kept batting despite an injury and scored a hundred.
\nHis innings included singles and doubles also. If you back players, this type of performance will follow,\u201d Shaheen said.
\nHe also praised Saad Baig and Arafat Minhas for their performances.
\n\u201cYes, Saad and Arafat Minhas played a good series,\u201d Shaheen said.
\nHe said Babar knew his game well.
\n\u201cIf you talk about Babar, he knows his game and is going to play a first-class match within two days. He is clear about how to bat. Unfortunately, he faced some difficult dismissals, but that is part of cricket, and he will come back,\u201d Shaheen said.
\nShaheen said the tri-series had been a good contest, adding that England and Sri Lanka were major sides.
\n\u201cYou need such wins against teams like Sri Lanka and England. Sri Lanka have played top cricket. No one expected them to beat England, and they scored 300-plus three times. So it was a good series, and good cricket was played,\u201d Shaheen said.
\n\u201cI think we played good cricket,\u201d he added.
\nHe also defended Naseem Shah, who conceded 80 runs in the final.
\n\u201cNaseem was doing his best. The way things were going earlier, fast bowlers were not getting much assistance. We started bowling across the seam and thought that reverse swing could come into play towards the end. We planned to use slower balls, bouncers and yorkers to control Sri Lanka in the end. Naseem has played enough cricket. If you have to tell him what to do on every ball, then he should be playing Under-16 cricket,\u201d Shaheen said.
\nPakistan defeated Sri Lanka by three wickets on Saturday night to win the tri-series.
\nPakistan lost just one of their five matches in the tournament.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KARACHI Pakistan\u2019s ace pacer and ODI team captain Shaheen Afridi has missed the country\u2019s previous two major tours of the West Indies and England. He was in good form but was overlooked for those series. He has also not been drafted in the Test squad for the home series against Sri Lanka which will begin …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":105202,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105242,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105232\/revisions\/105242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}