Test captain Shan Masood opened up on wicketkeeper batter Sarfaraz Ahmed\u2019s exclusion from Pakistan\u2019s 12-member squad for the second Test against Australia. Sarfaraz, who had a forgetful outing in the Perth Test, was replaced by Mohammad Rizwan on Monday as the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) unveiled a 12-member squad for the upcoming second Test. Meanwhile, Pakistan\u2019s newly-appointed Test captain Shan Masood, who categorically coined Sarfaraz Ahmed as his first-choice wicketkeeper ahead of the tour, stated that it would be wrong to say that he was \u201cdropped\u201d and instead termed it as a \u201clittle bit of break to recuperate and come back\u201d. \u201cYou saw that with the selection of Khurram Shahzad and Aamer Jamal even though a lot of people felt it was quite risky putting two debutants out there. I think they handled themselves well and we have to give them credit because their first outing in Australia was quite decent. \u201cThe reason to play Sarfaraz was pretty much the same. People go back to stats and Rizwan averages very well in SENA. Firstly, there\u2019s no competition between the two. They\u2019re equally important to the team. Any competition they have is healthy competition. \u201cWe know what Rizwan has done but we gave Sarfaraz the benefit because he averaged 56.50 on his last tour here in 2016. Yes, that\u2019s been quite a while but he\u2019s also played red ball consistently in the Quaid-e-Azam trophy in the last few years. \u201cRizwan just came from the World Cup, a lot of white ball cricket. And he also had a gap in red-ball cricket since Sarfaraz took over from him for the New Zealand series. \u201cSarfaraz had an outstanding performance there and Rizwan hadn\u2019t played a lot of red-ball cricket. So, there was a method to it. He\u2019s been there, he played red-ball cricket. \u201cKarachi had a very good season where he was the tournament\u2019s MVP, and that allowed us to get a player like Rizwan into shape. If I had it my way, I\u2019d ideally like both to play but that\u2019s not possible. \u201cNow we think Rizwan is ready and we can give Saifi that little bit of break to recuperate and come back.\u201d Shan Masood also commented on his first defeat as Pakistan\u2019s Test captain when his side suffered a 360-run hammering in the first Test. \u201cOne Test is never a fair assessment,\u201d he said. \u201cYou need time. You need a bit more time. You\u2019ve already got a squad that\u2019s been playing Test cricket for a while. \u201cYou have to look at the domestic structure and the players available for red-ball cricket. A lot of things you need before you can sort of force that way of playing. \u201cYou need players to buy in. We want to give players ample opportunity to buy into the way we want to play. There are some things that we\u2019ve said from the outside that we want to play a more attractive brand of Test cricket. \u201cWe did that in Sri Lanka. We got some results as well. The challenge now is to do it against the best teams in world cricket.\u201d Pakistan squad for second TestImam-ul-Haq, Abdullah Shafique, Shan Masood (c), Babar Azam, Saud Shakeel, Mohammad Rizwan (wk), Salman Ali Agha, Shaheen Afridi (vc), Hasan Ali, Mir Hamza, Aamir Jamal, Sajid Khan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Test captain Shan Masood opened up on wicketkeeper batter Sarfaraz Ahmed\u2019s exclusion from Pakistan\u2019s 12-member squad for the second Test against Australia. Sarfaraz, who had…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12496,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}