Pakistan captain Mohammad Rizwan has said that his team’s campaign in the Champions Trophy has ended with Sunday’s six-wicket loss against India as well. However, Pakistan, having lost their first two league games, are out of the tournament as well.
“For now, we can say that it’s over. This is the truth,” the Pakistan captain said. “As a captain, I honestly don’t like this. If you can win, then do it. If you can’t, then don’t worry about it. I don’t care if you are sitting in someone else’s shadow. I don’t care if you are outside the tournament or in it. Yes, New Zealand has defeated us; India has defeated us. We accept it. We can play well; we can play badly. We can’t say that we should stay on someone else’s side. Allah has made this a chance, we can’t say anything about it.”
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He added, “In the next match, we’ll see what Bangladesh does with New Zealand, what New Zealand does with India, and what we do. It’s a long journey. Yes, we have hope and belief in Allah. Our dependence on the Champions Trophy has now come on other teams.”
However, Pakistan are the defending champions. Meanwhile, Rizwan stood by Pakistan’s decision to play with one specialist spinner, Abrar Ahmed. India, on the other hand, came into the tournament with four spinners and three of them played on Sunday.
“You can’t say that we made a mistake by picking just one spinner. If you look at that Indian team also they have Kuldeep (Yadav) as the front-line spinner. (Ravindra) Jadeja and Axar Patel are all-rounders. We also have Salman Ali Agha and Khushdil Shah. They bowled very well in the past,” he added.
“The middle-order was not good enough. Yesterday in our meeting we had discussed that on this pitch 270-280 runs would be enough. Because the outfield was slow and the pitch was slow. If we had scored 280, maybe the results would be different. Me (46) and Saud Shakeel (62) tried to build a partnership and took a lot of time. But after that, the shot selection was poor and that’s where they got a chance to take our wickets. After that our middle-order couldn’t take the pressure and we couldn’t manage,” Mohammad Rizwan concluded.
