Former Pakistan captain and coach Misbah-ul-Haq shared an interesting anecdote from the 2009 T20 World Cup final against Sri Lanka. Pakistan won the match by eight wickets, and when they needed six or seven runs to win, Younis came to Misbah and told him ‘pad up, you are next if will lose any wicket.”
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“Lala (Shahid Afridi) and Shoaib Malik were playing, and we needed 6 or 7 runs to win the match. Younis Khan came to me and said, ‘pad up, if we lose a wicket, you are going in’. He just wanted to me to enjoy the winning moment after what has happened in 2007 final. He wanted me to hit the winning shot. It was a very special moment,” Misbah told A Sports.
On the inaugural t20 World Cup final loss against India, Misbah said: “It was a very tough pill to swallow. We were the better team. It was a heartbreak.”
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Misbah also explained why T20 cricket suited Pakistan naturally. He said: “2007 was the first T20 World Cup. But for Pakistan, we were playing T20 cricket for a long time. We grew up playing Ramjaan cricket. There used to be so many T20 tournaments across Pakistan on cement pitches.”
“T20 Cricket suited our style of play. We were the favourite in 2007. The template nowadays teams think that you should have attacking openers, good middle-order batters, who can play spin well, rotate the strike, pick those gaps, and then impact players who can finish things off at the end. From top to bottom, we had all based covers.”
“Throughout the tournament, we played like a champion. We should have won the final easily. We lost the final from almost winning position,” he added.
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Unlike 2007, when Pakistan was winning every match, two years later, they had a terrible start to the tournament.
“We had a terrible start in 2009. We lost the warm-up matches. There was no combination, and no performances from big players. The New Zealand game became a must-win game, and we won it convincingly. We needed to beat the Netherlands by a big margin, and we did it. Once we were in the semis, the self-belief in the team was completely different.
“Lala stepped up in the semifinal, and we defeated South Africa, one of the tournament’s strongest teams, and then the final was one-sided as well,” he said.
