Playing XIs
India XI: Rohit Sharma (c), Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, Lokesh Rahul (wk), Hardik Pandya, Ravindra Jadeja, Shardul Thakur, Kuldeep Yadav, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj.
Pakistan XI: Abdullah Shafique, Imam-ul-Haq, Babar Azam (c), Mohammad Rizwan (wk), Saud Shakeel, Iftikhar Ahmed, Mohammad Nawaz, Shadab Khan (vc), Hasan Ali, Shaheen Afridi, Haris Rauf
Cricket World Cup: Shaheen Shah Afridi, Haris Rauf, Shadab Khan – Pakistan’s bowling guns searching for form before India game
Couple of days ago, former Pakistan captain Shahid Afridi called his son-in-law Shaheen Shah Afridi. Shaheen has bled runs in the last couple of games, looked off-pace, off-kilter, and out of sorts. Pakistan has been fretting. The rest of the cricketing world has been puzzled. What has happened to the man who knocks out oppositions in the first round that he has been carted around by Shubman Gill in the Asia Cup, and by Kusal Mendis in this World Cup?
Afridi tells Samaa TV that he urged Shaheen to ask the performance analyst for his bowling videos. That the lengths and lines have been wrong – “not hit hard lengths,” and “too much room”. And Afridi says, Shaheen agreed with the assessment, and has promised that he would sort himself out in the couple of days leading up to the India game in Ahmedabad. In the studio, Mohammad Yousuf and Mushtaq Ahmed nodded sagely. A day before the game, in Ahmedabad, skipper Babar Azam would remind a questioner about how Shaheen is a “champion and a big-match player”.
