Champions Trophy: Pakistan’s archaic batting approach derails its dreams

CHENNAI: The Champions Trophy for Pakistan was meant to be a moment of pride, with the country hosting an ICC event after 29 years. Instead, it turned into a nightmare. Not only did it fail to qualify, but its lacklustre performances exposed deep flaws in its approach to the game.

As any team that has faced isolation would go through, Pakistan—once a leader in cricket innovation across Asia, now struggles to even keep up with the rest, particularly in ODIs.

The team travelled all the way to Dubai to play a “home game” against India before returning to Pakistan again for a dead rubber against Bangladesh in its final group stage game which was abandoned due to rain.

Nobody expected Pakistan to be favourite going into the iconic clash against India. But the manner in which the losses came and the famously used word “intent” among players was surely lacking.

Against New Zealand, Fakhar Zaman’s injury forced him to bat down the order and when he did come to bat, the team was reeling at 22 for 2 in ten overs— its lowest score in that phase for the team at home since 2002 in the 50-over format.

Fakhar managed 24 off 41 balls and with Babar Azam scoring a sluggish 64 off 90 balls, Pakistan never gained momentum.

Against India it repeated the same mistake, playing 61 dot balls in the first 15 overs—this against a Mohammed Shami who wasn’t at his best and an inexperienced Harshit Rana.

Both Rizwan and Saud Shakeel were hesitant to be proactive and their game sucked the momentum off the innings in the middle part of the game where India wasn’t doing a good job of getting wickets even in the game against Bangladesh.

But the template for these types of situations usually would be for one of them to stay till the end while the other shifts the gear. But that didn’t happen as when the skipper got out in the 34th over, it went from 151 for 3 to 241 all out which was a near impossible score to defend with the batting line-up of India.

In total, it played 161 dot balls against New Zealand and 147 against India in this tournament.

In the five innings since the beginning of the year, Pakistan played 145 dot balls approximately per innings on average. Bangladesh and Afghanistan are the only other teams with more dot balls than that, but they have played less compared to Pakistan this year.

Barring Fakhar Zaman and Saim Ayub, both of whom are now injured, none of the top-order batters in the side have a strike rate above 90 since 2024.

The mindset of Pakistan’s top three batters smacks of conservatism as their side doesn’t have an impact player that can be trusted in the final phase of the game. And in an era where the mentality of teams is to treat it like a T20I if they have wickets in hand, Pakistan needs to rebrand its game to revive its glory.