While Pakistan continued their losing streak in all forms of cricket, Shahid Afridi reached an individual landmark today. He completed 6000 career runs in ODIs. I must also say that today he indeed played a very brave innings. Only if few others had stayed longer with him, then Pakistan had the match in their hands. Atleast run-rate was never an issue today.
Anyways, back to the individual records. Afridi has now become Pakistan’s 7th and World’s 40th batsman to reach 6000 ODI runs. Following is the updated list of Pakistanis who have achieved this milestone. Numbers in parenthesis show their World ranking in terms of highest ODI career runs.
1 (4). Inzamam-ul-Haq 11739 runs at an average of 39.52
2 (9). Muhammad Yousuf 9624 runs at 42.39
3 (13). Saeed Anwar 8824 runs at 39.21
4 (25). Javed Miandad 7381 runs at 41.7
5 (27). Saleem Malik 7170 runs at 32.88
6 (34). Ijaz Ahmed 6564 runs at 32.33
7 (40). Shahid Afridi 6066 runs at 23.51
While Afridi has been vowing for a united team, it will take time to build trust among players- especially when a total of 4 former/current captains and vice-captains are in the same playing XI and all of them came out blatantly accusing each other about the last Australian tour.
Fighting spirit in lower-middle order was nowhere to be seen. Contrast this to the golden days of Imran/Javed era when one could count on #11 (say Tauseef) to give his best and not go down without a fight.
Good to know that Afridi got an ODI hundred after five years.
Beats me why a batsman like Razzaq is sent at number 8 when there are no class batsmen in the top order.He ran out of partners,otherwise he could have finished the job.
Well its a great achievement from Pakistani Captian
Afridi, of course, the most exciting and most popular cricketer has taken up challenge to build up our team once again into a formidable combination of world beaters. He has started very well in this match personally as well as the team leader, team members response too very positive.
http://www.pakistancamp.com
Odd, but for the very first time in my life I am more interested in what happened in Football than in Cricket.