Misbahul Haq fails to defend Pakistan team after England ODIs debacle

Pakistan head coach Misbahul Haq has admitted that he can’t defend the Men in Green’s performance after they were whitewashed 3-0 by England in the ODI series.

While speaking in a virtual press conference on Wednesday, Misbah said that Pakistan wasn’t able to adapt to the conditions and blamed the lapses in fielding department for the series loss.

"You can't defend this kind of performance. It is a poor and disappointing performance. We couldn't deal with the conditions in the first two matches. In the last match, our batting performed well, Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan played good innings and the total should have been defended. Overall, it was a very disappointing performance. Fielding has been a problem throughout the series," Misbah said.

ALSO READ: Isolation over, Morgan back in England squad for Pakistan T20Is

Misbah believes that the team management needs to sit down and analyze what went wrong in the series and how they can improve things moving forward

"If you look back, we won the home series against South Africa and the away series too. I think all the departments, be it batting, bowling or fielding. It feels like we have come back to the point from where we started. We have to just find how we can move on from here and analyze why we performed in this manner. We have been performing well in the last five-six series but we only played PSL in the last few months and over here we looked off-colour. It's a worrying sign for me as well," he said.

Misbah also admitted that Pakistan has been struggling to find reliable middle-order batsmen and had to rely on performances in the PSL to fill that gap.

"Firstly, we need to look at how England has the luxury by having a pool of players, I think they are lucky and they have a lot of choices. We at certain positions have limitations. We have limitations in the middle order and there are a few spaces that for a very long time we don't have settled players," he said.

"According to the team's requirement, sometimes players come earlier in the team than they should. If you have many choices available and players are coming from domestic after scoring big runs, then we prefer those. If we need certain players then we sometimes have to pick from PSL," he added.