AB de Villiers: “Now for plenty more runs for your team”
Image taken by: Bimal Mirwani
Legendary South Africa batsman AB de Villiers has backed Pakistan star Babar Azam to score “plenty more runs” now that he is no longer limited overs captain.
Azam, who stepped down from the role at the beginning of October, has been struggling to score runs consistently over the last few months.
With the pressure of the captaincy off his shoulders, De Villiers thinks the 30-year-old will start getting big scores as he is free to focus on his batting.
“Now for plenty more runs for your team,” the 40-year-old from Pretoria said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Azam recently represented Pakistan in their two-Test series against Bangladesh and made 64 runs at an average of 16.
He then played in the Champions One-Day Cup, which was a domestic 50-over competition that took place in Faisalabad.
In four games for the Stallions, he accumulated 230 runs, which included a century and a fifty, at an average of 76.66.
Following this, Azam was involved in the first Test against England, but could only manage scores of 30 and 5.
He was subsequently removed from the squad for the second Test, which Pakistan won by 152 runs, and won’t be selected in the playing XI for the third Test either, which starts on October 24 in Rawalpindi.
Pakistan Squad for 2nd and 3rd Tests against England: Shan Masood (captain), Saud Shakeel (vice-captain), Aamer Jamal, Abdullah Shafique, Haseebullah Khan (wicketkeeper), Kamran Ghulam, Mehran Mumtaz, Mir Hamza, Mohammad Ali, Muhammad Hurraira, Mohammad Rizwan (wicketkeeper), Noman Ali, Saim Ayub, Sajid Khan, Salman Ali Agha, Zahid Mahmood.
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