Asia Cup 2018: Rohit Sharma And Shikhar Dhawan Were Exceptional: Sarfraz Ahmed

Pakistan’s highly-rated bowling lineup underperformed again as Shikhar Dhawan and Rohit Sharma scored centuries to help India inflict a humiliating defeat on the arch-rivals in the Asia Cup.

As far as Pakistan’s batting was concerned, it was yet another unimpressive performance from them. Imam-ul-Haq and Fakhar Zaman once again failed to provide their team a good start. Yuzvendra Chahal sent back Imam cheaply with the scoreboard reading 24. Babar Azam and Fakhar then took the score past the 50-run mark before departing in quick succession.

Shoaib Malik and Sarfraz Ahmed joined hands when Pakistan was reeling at 58 for 3. The experienced duo added 107 runs to bail their team of trouble. But with India keeping things tight, Pakistan’s innings never really got the impetus. And any hopes of scoring some fast runs in the slog overs ended when Malik was out for 73.

But any score in the end would have made little difference in the end as Rohit Sharma and Shikhar Dhawan gave the arch-rivals no chance at all. Both scored centuries to share a mammoth 210-run stand for the first wicket before Rohit and Ambati Rayudu took the team home in the 40th over.

Speaking at the end of the day, Pakistan skipper Sarfraz Ahmed rued the dropped catches and also admitted that his side was 20-25 runs short of a good total.

“We made it tough for ourselves by dropping those catches. We were 20-25 runs short and if we would have held on to our catches we could have possibly made things interesting. The boys are doing the hard work but they’re not able to take those crucial catches,” he said at the presentation ceremony.

At the same time, the Pakistan star did not take anything away from Dhawan and Rohit.

The wicket was a bit difficult to play on in the afternoon as the cracks had widened up a bit. Had we got early wickets, this chase would have been certainly difficult. We have been losing a lot of wickets in the early overs and hence it becomes difficult to recover from such situations. The way they batted, all credit to them. Rohit and Dhawan were exceptional. They have shown better skills as compared to us. We need to work a lot on our skill level if at all we want to get into the final. It’s a do-or-die match against Bangladesh, hopefully we’ll come out on top.