RAWALPINDI: Pakistan cricket team’s head coach Mickey Arthur on Thursday added fuel to the reported rift between him and fast bowler Sohail Khan when he said that Khan’s chances of making a comeback into the national team are very slim, according to a Dawn News report.
The former Australian coach said that he enjoys a good relation with Sohail and there are no differences between them as reported by a section of the media. “I and Sohail enjoy good relations and I admire the hard work Sohail has been doing,” said Arthur. “He has altered his mindset and has been bowling well.”
“But I keep telling him that he is 34-years-old now while we have got many younger players who are playing really good cricket at 23 and 24 years of age. Unfortunately, that is the harsh truth,” he said.
“The systems might have failed him long ago, but if ten years ago he had done what he is doing right now, then who knows how big an international player he would have become,” he said. Arthur admired Khan’s efforts in regaining fitness and form and reinventing himself in all formats of the game and has made significant strides in finding the right balance.
The head coach also talked about one of Pakistan’s fittest players, Fawad Alam, who was also invited to the National Cricket Academy (NCA) recently to display his skills. “It was good to have Fawad at NCA. We got to know about his fitness for the longer format,” said Arthur.
“We put him through some good net sessions, it was an opportunity for us to see him play and see his skills and know what he is about,” he said. “We had a look at his techniques to see how many pulls and how many types of strokes he has.”
He further said that 32-year-old Alam needs to consistently score runs and push boundaries to make himself noticeable in the eyes of selectors.
He said that he wants to see the players getting better and improving all the time. “We want to make sure every individual lifts his performance so we don’t want the players to get into a comfort zone,” he said.
“Our T20 team is doing well and I think our ODI team is quite decent too,” said Arthur. “Our Test team was also on top but after Misbah and Younis left, its performance dropped and we could not do well against Sri Lanka. So now we need to work harder to get back that position in Test cricket too,” he concluded.
