Pakistan head coach Jason Gillespie has put his weight behind under-fire Shan Masood after his team suffered an ignominious 2-0 series loss against Bangladesh. The Tigers won the opening Test by 10 wickets at Rawalpindi and continued the good show in the second game as well, winning by six wickets at the same venue.
This is the first time when Bangladesh won a Test match against Pakistan and after winning the second game, the visitors showed their win in the opening Test wasn’t a fluke.
Meanwhile, Masood failed to lead from the front as he returned with scores of 6 and 14 in the two innings of the opening Test against the Tigers despite playing on a flat track. The southpaw scored 57 and 28 runs in the second Test match against the visitors.
Speaking to reporters, Gillespie said as quoted by Cricket Pakistan, “Shan I feel has led the side very well. We just haven’t played well as a team and that’s the reality. We need to sharpen up on certain areas and we will sharpen up. I really want to back and believe in these players, they are good enough and have shown glimpses of how good we are. We just need to do it more often and consistently.”
On the other hand, Masood reckons they allowed the opposition to come back into the game despite being in a dominating position. Bangladesh was 26-6 after Pakistan posted 274 runs in the first innings but the hosts couldn’t kill the game there.
“We thought we were playing good cricket in Australia but not doing the job, that’s something we need to work on. It has happened four times in my tenure that we have left the team back into the contest when we were dominating.
“274 was a good score in the first innings, me and Saim [Ayub] could have got more runs like Litton. But we should have done better from having them at 26/6. That’s something we need to work on and work on quickly.”
Pakistan has failed to win a single Test out of the last 10 games while playing at home.
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