Pakistan\u2019s team director Mohammad Hafeez put partial blame on \u201cinconsistent umpiring and technology curse\u201d after the visitors fell 79-run short during their chase of 317 in the second Test against Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) on Friday. Hafeez addressed a presser after the match and didn\u2019t hold back at all as he hit out at the inconsistent decisions by the umpires which played their part during Pakistan\u2019s loss in Melbourne. \u201cWe made some mistakes as a team, we take that and we will address those things. But at the same time, I believe [that] inconsistent umpiring, technology curse, really given us a result which should\u2019ve been different,\u201d Hafeez told in a press conference. “Pakistan failed to make a comeback after decision given against Mohammad Rizwan. We were very close to the victory in Melbourne Test but I’m very hopeful Pakistan can win Sydney Test.” He also addressed Babar Azam, who has been failing to score big in red-ball cricket as the 29-year-old finished the year 2023 without scoring a single half-century. \u201cBabar is a great player. We wish him to score big in upcoming matches. He is batting really well in the nets. We look forward for Babar to play a match-winning innings for Pakistan in Sydney Test,\u201d he added. It must be noted Hafeez\u2019s comments came after Pakistan\u2019s Mohammad Rizwan was given out controversially. The timing of the dismissal was crucial as the visitors looked were batting comfortably during their chase of 317 runs. Australia\u2019s skipper Pat Cummins appealed for a caught behind in the 61st over of Pakistan\u2019s second innings but the umpire gave it not out. After which the Australian captain decided to review the decision as he thought Rizwan might have gloved it. After the third umpire took a look at the appeal from different angles and reckoned that there was a spike as the ball passed the wrist band so the on-field umpire was asked to change his decision. However, the hotspot showed no mark as the 31-year-old looked away from the ball at the last second. Rizwan, who was sure that he didn’t get anything on it, went back to the hut in utter disbelief. Rizwan was batting on 35 runs, with Pakistan 98 runs away from victory, when the incident took place. Pakistan will play the last Test against Australia in Sydney, which will begin on January 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pakistan\u2019s team director Mohammad Hafeez put partial blame on \u201cinconsistent umpiring and technology curse\u201d after the visitors fell 79-run short during their chase of 317…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12628,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"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-12627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12627","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=12627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}