Is Every Team Balanced in the National T20 Cup 2021?
Pakistan`s second-biggest domestic T20 cricket tournament after the Pakistan Super League is the National T20 Cup is happening in Rawalpindi right now. In this tournament the international stars of the Pakistan cricket team like Babar Azam, Shaheen Shah Afridi, Muhammad Rizwan and Hassan Ali are blazing.
The most unique thing is that after 2005-06, it is the first time that any foreign commentator, Mike Haysman is commentating. It is the first time that we are seeing buggy cams and drone cams being used in a domestic tournament and we are getting full HD coverage not only in Pakistan but also in many parts of the world.
Everything is going smoothly in the tournament until now, but there is a question arising here that, Is every team in the tournament is equal in strength? because the team of Balochistan seems to lack the star players like other teams have and there is not a single player in the Balochistan team who is selected for the T20 World Cup happening next month. For instance, Central Punjab has three of its players nominated in the World Cup. Similarly Northern has five, Southern Punjab has three, Sindh has one and Khyber Pakhtun Khawa has three.
Keeping the world cup squad aside there is not a single player of the Balochistan team whom you can call a T20 great or a T20 gem player. The most famous, well-reputed, well-accomplished player is there Captain Imam ul Haq, who is a great ODI player but I don`t think so that he fits in any T20 side easily. Some other famous names are Yasir Shah (who is going through a bad patch of his bowling life), Junaid Khan (who is making a comeback after quite a few years) and Haris Sohail (who is similar to Imam good in ODI but hard to adjust to T20 cricket).
Even though Balochistan has beaten Southern Punjab in their third match after getting hammered for two consecutive matches, but that seems to be a fluke.
We cannot say with surety that what was the reason behind such an insane selection of the Balochistan team but we can give you the solution for it. One is to let senior players like Wahab Riaz, Shoaib Malik and Muhammad Hafeez play for the Balochistan team. This will groom the talent of Balochistan local players and of those players who are not well reputed for T20.
The other option is to let the youngsters of other strong teams who are warming the benches of those teams play for the Balochistan team because they seem to be more talented like Abdullah Shafique, Saif Badar, Muhammad Musa, Umer Khan and many others.
