J&K just finished its campaign in the Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 Trophy tournament with mixed bag of results of three wins and three defeats. They were knocked out of the tournament after finishing at fourth place in group.
While everyone back home is praising the J&K youngsters who were part of the J&K squad, particularly batsman. J&K young batsman lead by Jatin Wadhwan, Shubham Pundir, Abdul Samad did pretty well on the tracks that helped batsman. However one disappointing part that will worry J&K cricket lovers is the dismal outing of J&K bowlers.
Such is the dismal outing of J&K bowlers is that none of the J&K bowlers have managed to get place in 50 top wicket takers of the event. The only representation for J&K in top 100 wicket takers list is Parvez Rasool at 94th place with mere five wickets.
For the event J&K had gone with mix of senior and new comers. While juniors did pretty good job senior like Umar Nazir failed. Ram Dayal who was coming into team after long injury lay off did well in the two matches he played. Irfan Pathan who played as an all-rounder failed in both of his roles to lift the team.
However, overall J&K bowling failed and the lack of experience and quality hurt J&K in all the matches failed. Despite posting their best ever totals in the T20 cricket, J&K bowlers failed to defend those totals.
This brings us to our basic question, did J&K missed the experience and quality of pacer Mohammad Mudhasir in the tournament. He is old war horse who had proven himself time and again. The quality that he has would have helped J&K youngsters to rally around him in the event. Mudhasir didn’t did anything brilliant during Ranji Trophy season but one thing that made him special was to hand J&K crucial breakthroughs when it mattered most. When you look at current bowling options and current state of Irfan Pathan he was far better option than the former International.
As per our opinion J&K did miss him and it reflects in the overall results of J&K bowling in the tournament.