Legendary Australian cricketer Ricky Ponting offered a piece of advice to Pakistan ace batter Babar Azam, suggesting him to take a leaf out of India\u2019s Virat Kohli to regain his lost form, particularly in Test cricket. Babar is going through a rough patch as the right-handed batter averages just 20.7 in Tests since 2023. His series of dismal performances eventually led to his, Shaheen Shah Afridi and Naseem Shah\u2019s exclusion from the side for the remaining two Tests of the three-match series against England. The right-handed batter, ranked first in the ODI Batting Rankings, however, managed to hold on to his spot in Pakistan\u2019s white-ball sides, currently on a tour of Australia. Playing his first ODI since the ICC Men\u2019s Cricket World Cup 2023, Babar only managed 37 before being cleaned up by Adam Zampa in the touring side\u2019s gut-wrenching two-wicket defeat in the series opener against Australia on Monday. However, legendary captain Ponting remained concerned regarding Babar\u2019s dismal form in the longest format, insisting Pakistan should find a way to get their ace batter back into form. \u201cThe biggest challenge is how they get Babar back into their side,\u201d Ponting said in the ICC Review. \u201cThey’ve got to find a way to get Babar back into form and back into their [Test] team.\u201d Ponting then drew parallels between the rough patch of Babar to that of Kohli, who took a notable break in 2022, owing to his three-year century drought. The break turned out to be beneficial for the Indian batter as he ended his long-going century drought before delivering stellar performances at the ICC Men\u2019s T20 World Cup 2022, the highlight of which was his unbeaten match-winning knock against arch-rivals Pakistan. \u201cYou know, when you look at (Babar\u2019s) numbers, it’s been a bit like the stuff that we were talking about with Virat [Kohli] earlier on,\u201d Ponting said. \u201cSometimes \u2013 and I think Virat was on record saying this \u2013 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. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Legendary Australian cricketer Ricky Ponting offered a piece of advice to Pakistan ace batter Babar Azam, suggesting him to take a leaf out of India\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20851,"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-20850","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\/20850","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=20850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}