Saud Shakeel, vice-captain of the Pakistan red-ball side has suggested that the national team should prepare pitches and playing conditions series-by-series, and according to the opposition.
“We should look at pitches for series to series and match to match. And we’ve come to realize this quite late,” Shakeel said while speaking to the media.
Since returning from the UAE, Pakistan has struggled to determine the best way to leverage its home advantage. In the initial years, the strategy was to make a stark shift from their UAE approach by opting for seam-friendly pitches that they believed would be easier to prepare.
This change coincided with the emergence of a talented group of fast bowlers, mainly Shaheen Shah Afridi and Naseem Shah. Early successes, such as Naseem’s five-wicket haul against Sri Lanka and a hat-trick against Bangladesh, along with a two-Test series victory over South Africa in which Afridi took five wickets on a crucial final day in Rawalpindi, seemed to validate this approach.
However, after Pakistan put out a lifeless pitch in Rawalpindi before a Test against Australia, seam-friendly surfaces disappeared almost immediately. This led to an 11-match winless streak at home, their longest ever, during which they lost seven of the matches played. That run was finally snapped last week on a deteriorating pitch in Multan.
Pakistan have decided against announcing their playing XI on Tuesday unlike England, opting instead to take more time to assess the pitch before settling on who will take the field for the decider.