Pakistan cricket and the lack of Hardik Pandya-like 'finishers’

PCB needs to morph young players into 'finishers', rather than waiting for one to come through the ranks

KARACHI:

The world was drooling over Hardik Pandya when he hit the Australian debutante Daniel Sams out of the park twice in the last over of the second T20I to take India home, but Pakistanis were all the while also wondering when they’ll see a Man in Green do the same for Pakistan, and that too consistently.

The role of the ‘finisher’, one that came to the spotlight and evolved with the advent of T20s, has become instrumental for teams in the shortest format of cricket.

With Mickey Arthur in the coaching position, a returning to the national fray, Pakistan veteran Shoaib Malik was given the role of the finisher. The South African coach believed that Malik was perfectly suited for the role because of his experience and more importantly his calmness under pressure.

And when the time came, Malik did deliver for Pakistan as the finisher and helped the Men in Green add a few Ws to their list.

However, with Malik aging and losing his Midas touch sooner than expected, Misbahul Haq has been looking for someone to fill his shoes, but no player, old or young, has shown the promise and potential that Pandya currently has.

However, there’s one question that comes to mind when we use the word ‘finisher’, which is what attributes does such an individual possess? Or, how can you morph a player into a ‘finisher’?

Pakistan cricket is a perfect case study to understand what a finisher should and should not look like. Throughout Pakistan’s cricketing history, the team has had players who were natural and then there were players who promised a lot but delivered nothing.

So the first trait that a finisher needs to have is that he can go big at will. In the 18-man squad which takes on New Zealand in T20Is, only Haider Ali has shown such promise, but it is still not a surety whether he can be the finisher that Pakistan want and desire.

Historically, there were only two Pakistani players who had the ability to clear the boundary with utter ease: Shahid Afridi and Abdul Razzaq.

While many would count Afridi to be better than Razzaq, the former was more mercurial and less dependable when it came to finishing.

Afridi did turn the tide for Pakistan in matches which seemed like definite losses, but with the amount of cricket he played, the number of finished matches doesn’t stand anywhere near to the number of matches where he left the business unfinished.

Meanwhile, Razzaq was the more dependable option. His ability to hit nearly everything straight down the line was exceptional. But he started failing when people found out his weakness against the short ball.

This brings us to the second point. What shots should a finisher be able to play? When you look at Pakistani players, there is none who is able to play shots all around the ground with ease.

Currently in-form Hafeez can be clinical in shot selection against spinners, but stutters against pacers.

Babar is a class act, but you can’t expect him to scoop one over the keeper or reverse sweep a pacer for a boundary. He just isn’t built to go from his classic, orthodox, inch-perfect, textbook batting style to an AB de Villier-esque setting.

Newcomers like Haider, Abdullah Shafique, Khushdil Shah and Hussain Talat haven’t played enough international cricket yet to put on display their complete range of batting shots, so they do not, right now, qualify for the role too.

Last, but not the least, a finisher needs to bat in the middle or lower-middle order. This then excludes our prime batsman Babar Azam from the list since he opens or bats one-down for Pakistan in T20s.

Many would say that give the role to Hafeez for now. However, no one can discount that fact that he is aging and has only a year or two of cricket left in him. Then what?

Rather than trying to find a finisher then, Pakistan will have to pick two to three potential candidates right now. With the help of old and new players, who had one or more than one abilities needed to finish matches, these candidates should be turned into perfect ‘finishing’ machines for the upcoming T20 World Cup.

All in all, someone needs to wake up and be proactive in the Pakistan Cricket Board and stop waiting for a natural finisher like Pandya to come through the ranks. If you can’t get one, why not build one from scratch?