New Zealand have crushed Pakistan 4-1 in a 5-match T20I series. The Pakistan team barely managed to avoid whitewash with a win in the last match of the series at Christchurch. This series has forced the team management to go back to the drawing board.
In this article, we will take a look at 3 major mistakes committed by Pakistan in the T20I series against New Zealand.
Instability in the team
Throughout the series, Pakistan made a lot of chopping and changing in the team combination. These frequent changes brought a sense of instability to the team. Some would argue that they are trying to give opportunities to new faces but even in that case, these many changes would not augur well for those youngsters.
Giving them a chance in a couple of matches and then dropping them would make them insecure about their place in the team which would result in a plummeting self-belief
Batters playing out of position
We have seen in the series that a lot of young faces in the Pakistan team batted out of position which adversely affected out of position. For instance, Fakhar Zaman and Sahibzada Farhan were the two who batted out of their natural position, which is the opening slot, throughout the series.
This chaos in the batting order did not let Pakistan counter the Kiwi bowling lineup the way they would have wanted. Pakistan need to sort the batting order as soon as possible because there is not much time left before the T20 World Cup.
No conviction while chasing the scores
Pakistan lost the first three matches of the series while chasing the target but there was a clear lack of conviction in the run chase. On most of those occasions, only one or two players did the heavy lifting and there was not enough support from the other end which resulted in repeated failures.
The inability to chase challenging totals might haunt them in the T20 World Cup and to alleviate this problem other batters need to step up to assist Babar and Rizwan.