http://www.senore.com/Cricket/Shahid-Afridi-c2482 appreciates Pakistan’s performance in the ICC World Cup 2011
http://www.senore.com/Cricket/India-c750, which resulted in the departure of the Cornered Tigers from the ICC World Cup 2011. During the post match press conference, Pakistan’s skipper Shahid Afridi applauded the overall performance of his team during their entire World Cup tenure.
Pakistan lost to India in a scrappy encounter at Mohali by 29 runs. Most commentators believe that the squad performed below par as far as the three major aspects of the game were concerned, especially in the field where they dropped plenty of catches, providing the “Master Blaster” Sachin Tendulkar a golden opportunity to complete his damaging knock of 85 runs.
They had their fair bit of chances throughout the game but each time they were unable to clinch from the Men in Blue.
During the press conference, Afridi mentioned that they failed to live up to the expectations of their fans as far as their batting was concerned. Chasing against any side had been problematic for Pakistan in the past and same was the case at Mohali on Wednesday.
Afridi said, "The matches where we had partnerships we made good scores. Because we couldn't make partnerships, today we struggled and played some bad shots at the wrong time as well."
They stepped into the competition with only one loss in seven matches. This stint comes after another period of turmoil in which they lost their three key players Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif and former skipper Salman Butt. Contributing to the turmoil was the fact that Afridi was not declared the Captain of the Pakistan squad until two weeks before the tournament commenced. However, the underrated side from Pakistan played above all expectations to reach the penultimate stages of this prestigious competition after snapping the Aussies 34-match winning streak in the World Cup.
Afridi applauded his team’s performance by saying, "I am proud of my team and the boys have done a great job in this World Cup. A few of the youngsters are very promising and we played as one unit. Winning and losing is something different but we really played really good cricket and no one was expecting us to play cricket like this. As a skipper I'm very happy."
Pakistan achieved this milestone after consecutive failures in 2003 and 2007 ICC World Cups, where they failed to make it to the knock-out stages of the tournament, which resulted in immense criticism from fans. Most fans from Pakistan will blame Misbah-Ul-Haq for this loss. Although in defense of the batsman, he did not have much choice when wickets were falling at regular intervals at the other end.
Surprisingly, except for a few incidents, this World Cup campaign from Pakistan was free of scandals. A sense of unity and harmony was evident among the Men in Green. Holistically, a good performance by the Pakistan squad deserves a respectable homecoming.
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