Pakistan entitled to curate pitches that suit them at home, says Shaheen

The surfaces across the three-game ODI series against Australia had increasingly aided bowlers. In all three games, the highest total was 231 runs, scored by Australia in the second game. 

The pitches were under discussion, with many debating whether curating pitches to match the side's strengths has no long-term benefit for teams. Many also pointed to the fact that the 2027 ODI World Cup will have bouncy surfaces rather than the cracked tracks in Pakistan.

Slow tracks to help prepare Pakistan

Pakistan's white-ball head coach Mike Hesson, however, disagreed as he took to his social media handle and claimed that some surfaces in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia will lend themselves more to slower bowlers. Hesson also said that the team will experiment with a variety of tracks as they prepare for the World Cup.

Following their 2-1 win against Australia, Pakistan's captain Shaheen Shah Afridi echoed the same view. Recalling the last time Pakistan played an ODI series in Australia, Shaheen said the host venues dished out green tops as it posed an advantage to the home team.

"There are 15 months to the World Cup," Afridi said. "Every team prepares pitches that suit them when they play in their backyard to win."

"We have Test series [in the West Indies and England coming up] in which some of these players will play and they can use them to prepare themselves [for the World Cup],” said Afridi. 

“We played on green and bouncy pitches when we went to Australia under [Mohammad] Rizwan's captaincy and we won that series. You cannot offer them green wickets when they come here because we have to win."

Tough batting surfaces

The surfaces across Rawalpindi and Lahore in this series hardly offered anything to batters. In the last ODI, Pakistan had a taxing task chasing a modest 157. Shaheen acknowledged that the decks used in the series weren't a batter's dream but this was all deliberate as Pakistan look to prepare on different kinds of surfaces.

"These were tough wickets, and scoring runs or spending time on them was not easy. We have time on our hands before the World Cup and we will prepare pitches of different characteristics as well in the build-up."

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