Pakistan bowling coach Waqar Younis has slammed left-arm pacers Wahab Riaz and Mohammad Amir for quitting Test cricket so abruptly.
Waqar stated that “Amir and Wahab ‘ditched’ the national team” before the crucial tour of Australia last year.
While Waqar said that having Amir and Wahab wouldn’t have necessarily changed Pakistan’s fortunes, he pointed out that the team would have at least put up more of a fight.
“We should have a policy, we can’t stop players from playing cricket where they want or put restrictions by law, but we can have a policy from the board regarding big players who suddenly decide to leave a certain format,” he was quoted as saying by PakPassion.
“This means that you suddenly have to rely on youngsters and we had that problem when Wahab and Amir weren’t available. I won’t say we would have won in Australia, but maybe with their experience, we could have performed better and gotten better results.
“If someone isn’t in the mood to play then you should have backups available in terms of bench strength. So we should have a policy whereby players don’t leave suddenly, which causes the team issues.
“We took 2-3 youngsters to Australia, not just one. The main reason for that is that Amir and Wahab ‘gave us a dhoka’ at the last minute, they decided they wouldn’t play Tests 15-20 days before the tour. So we had to groom the younger lot, that is the reason we took them.
“Unfortunately (Muhammad) Musa couldn’t perform well in his first match. Naseem (Shah) also didn’t do that well, but when we came back to Pakistan, he did well. Same goes for (Mohammad) Abbas and Shaheen (Shah Afridi). Australia isn’t an easy place for bowlers to succeed. It was a tough series. After us, even New Zealand struggled. It was also tough for the batters.”
Amir, after making his international comeback in 2016, played all the three formats almost without rest. With a lack of quality bowlers in the squad, he was also handed over the responsibility to lead the Pakistani attack in all formats.
During the time of his Test retirement, Amir boasted impressive numbers with 119 wickets from 36 matches at an average of 30.47. Thus, it came as a shocker to the cricket world to see that one of the best fast bowlers of this generation has decided to quit Test cricket at an early stage of his career.
