CricketViewer.com

Pakistan aren’t a team alien to collapses, but if Bob Woolmer has to go to the extent of terming it “the worst batting I’ve seen in my time as coach” it must be bad news.

Woolmer described Pakistan’s collapse as “abject” and hoped that his team would learn to play on these bowler-friendly pitches.

“It was a very poor batting performance,” he said emphatically. “Our fielding and bowling was excellent - much better than the previous game - but our batting was abject. It wasn’t an easy surface by any stretch of imagination but our shot selection wasn’t very good,” he added.

“If we bat the way we did today, even the presence of Inzamam-ul-Haq would not have been enough. A defeat like this is disappointing. We’re disappointed for the Pakistan public. We let them down,” he said.

A big factor in this game, though, was a pitch out utterly of character with the subcontinent - one with appreciable bounce and seam. The nature of the surface meant that a batsman like Justin Kemp, usually flamboyant in his strokeplay, had to knuckle down.

Kemp admitted that he, along with the other half-centurion Mark Boucher, were targeting around 160-170 when they’d got their eye in. “When we got a 100, 160 to 180 was still in our minds,” said Kemp. “Batting on that wicket I felt that it (the ball) was going to do more under lights. I thought 213 was enough but we were trying to keep wickets in hand at the death,” he added.

Woolmer, though, refused to criticise the surface, focusing his ire at the batsmen instead.

“We thought it was a better pitch than the one we played against New Zealand,” he asserted.

“It was skiddy and there was a lot of seam movement. We need to learn to play on these types of pitches. It is not temperamental, it’s technical. Our players play a lot away from the body,” he added.

“We had the same problem in Perth which we worked on. When exposed to a class bowling attack on a wicket which is not just bouncy but actually seaming and moving around, then most sides get into trouble. Even South Africa got into trouble,” he explained.

Source:The News