The last couple of years haven’t been great for Babar Azam. After going through disappointing ODI and T20 World Cup campaigns, the star batter was recently dropped from Pakistan’s Test team following two years of non-performance. He returned to cricket after a short break and looked good against Australia but couldn’t get a big one.
Australian great Ricky Ponting feels that Pakistan needs to get Babar back into form and then into the Test side. He feels Babar’s going through a rough patch, and like another Asian cricket superstar, Virat Kohli needs to step away from the game for a little while to get his mojo back.
“The biggest challenge is how they get Babar back into their side. They’ve got to find a way to get Babar back into form and back into their [Test] team,” Ponting said in the ICC Review.
Babar needs to follow Kohli’s footsteps
“You know, when you look at (Babar’s) numbers, it’s been a bit like the stuff that we were talking about with Virat [Kohli] earlier on. Sometimes – and I think Virat was on record saying this – that little bit of a break that he had, he took himself away from the game for a while to freshen up and sort out some things that he needed to sort out,” the former Australian skipper added.
In the last two years, Kohli‘s taken two breaks. He took a month-long break before the 2022 Asia Cup and after that went on a tear. He went on to score an international hundred after 1000 days, averaged over 50 in Test cricket once again, and broke the record for most runs scored in a single edition of the ODI World Cup.
But, before taking a break, Kohli wasn’t in a great place mentally. He’d later describe it, saying, “I was experiencing that I’m not excited to train; I wasn’t excited to practice, and that really disturbed me because this is not who I am.” His next break came earlier this year when he took a two-month break after the birth of his second child. He came refreshed back from it and went on to score heaps of runs in the IPL and then played a crucial knock in the T20 World Cup Final against South Africa.
“This might be exactly what Babar needs. Maybe Babar needs to get away for a while and stop trying too hard. Lock the kit bag away for a while, and think about something else and then hopefully come back recharged, because we know at his best he’s as good as anyone going around. Hopefully we get to see that in the back half of his career again,” Ponting concluded.
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