Pakistan announced their squad for the upcoming Test series against South Africa and some of their selection calls did raise eyebrows. The Men in Green brought back former skipper Babar Azam into the Test squad and dropped pace spearhead Shaheen Afridi. This decision was heavily criticized by former Pakistan cricketer Basit Ali.
Basit believes that rather than being dropped because of poor performances, Shaheen was dropped from the side due to the incident that took place during Pakistan’s first Test against Bangladesh. A video went viral in which Shaheen was seen removing skipper Shan Masood’s hand from his shoulder during a team huddle on the field.
“Shaheen Afridi was asked to bowl on dead pitches, and he couldn’t perform so what about Naseem Shah’s performance? In the ODI series that Pakistan won against Australia, what did Naseem Shah do? I will tell you why Shaheen was removed. You must remember a video where Shan put a hand on Shaheen’s shoulder, and he removed it,” Basit said on his YouTube channel.
Basit also questioned PCB’s decision of bringing back Babar into the Test fold. The 53-year-old asked if Babar’s form since the England Test was enough to mark his comeback in the red-ball side.
“How many domestic matches Babar has played since being removed from the Test team? When Babar was dropped from the Test team, on what performance did he return to the team? He is a good player, but did his form improve after being dropped from that series?” Basit said.
Babar did recently feature in Pakistan’s ODI and T20I series against Australia, however he wasn’t really able to improve his fortunes, scoring 80 runs in the 3 ODIs and 47 runs in the 3 T20Is. It will be interesting to see if the batter can finally regain his form in the upcoming South Africa series.
