JOIN USPakistan coach Mickey Arthur frankly admitted his team had been completely outclassed by India in their opening Champions Trophy encounter but hoped to make a comeback in the next two games.
“The guys tried as hard as they could. My issue is fear. My issue is getting out there and really looking to take the game on and just believing in themselves and believing that they can take the game on. We talk about setting the tone up front. But we didn't do that,” said a visibly disappointed Arthur.
“The worrying thing for me and it has been for a period of time is we just do the basics wrong. We do the simple things wrong. We drop simple catches. We don't run well enough between wickets. We don't hit the keeper with our throws. We don't understand when to bowl our variations. We bowled a really good over and then we bowled a variation with our sixth ball and that's the ball that ended up going for a boundary. So it's the simplicity of those things that are worrying me at the moment and our understanding of when to do certain things. So that was disappointing. But we'll bounce back from it,” added the South African.
Questions answered
Arthur felt the heavy defeat could be the whiplash Pakistan needs to get their bearings right. “It (the defeat) will never take Pakistan cricket backwards. In fact, something like this could take it forward, for the simple reason that a lot of questions get answered. When we put a performance in like that we answer a lot of questions, and a lot of things become clearer for us in terms of how we take this team forward. So, yeah, it is disappointing. The boys didn't go out there to perform like that. The boys have trained extremely hard. They've worked extremely hard over 12 days. It's up to me and my coaching staff to find out why we didn't execute. Find out why they were we so tentative. Those are the issues for me at the moment. So, yeah, it's disappointing, but we'll go back to the drawing board and we'll hopefully come back a lot stronger.”