Misbah-ul-Haq happy with the fight his team put up at the Wanderers

Misbah-ul-Haq, the Pakistan captain, is not too disappointed with his team’s performance after the third fixture of the five-match One Day International (ODI) series against South Africa and is heartened by the fact that his side fought till the very last ball.

Much to the surprise of the cricket fans around the world, Misbah opted to bowl first after winning the toss on a classic batting track. Pakistan started in a brilliant fashion, picking up a couple of early wickets and tied down the scoring rate of the home team.

However, Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers played out of their skins and constructed a massive partnership of 238 runs for the third-wicket partnership, which happens to be a world record. As a result, the Proteas posted a mammoth total of 343 runs on the board for the loss of five wickets.

Pakistan also did well in their innings and remained in the match right till the end before being bowled out in the 49^th over of the innings for 309 runs. Shahid Afridi came up with a wonderful innings, scoring 88 runs off just 48 balls, in which he struck seven hits out of the park.

While expressing his views after the match, the Pakistan captain said that he is taking a lot of positives from this game. The middle-order batsman was all praise for Afridi but feels that loosing Irfan in the middle of South Africa’s innings was a massive loss.

“I’m really pleased with the way everybody played. The way we played today, it showed we can be a good chasing side. To lose Irfan was disappointing, that maybe led us to concede 20 or 30 runs more. With these field restrictions, you need five fielders in the circle, we just backed Afridi and he played tremendously today,” Misbah said.

The skipper admits that his team could have done better with the ball in hand.

He added, “We know he can hit it a long way, when he came to bat and hit the first six, I told him, “mate, you can score a hundred here.” With these new rules, if two batsmen are set, it’s difficult to control them, also there was no spin, no seam nothing. We could improve to bring the total down.”

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Posted by Yasir Hashmi on Mar 18 2013. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.