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Wicket-keeper and All-Rounder
The wicket-keeper was a very difficult choice, but in the end, we chose Sarfraz Ahmed. The Pakistan captain's leadership has been awe-inspiring, meaning he is also our captain, while his batting has come along nicely recently. Starting with his T20 captaincy, Pakistan have won 85% of their T20I matches since 2016, 17 wins from 20 matches specifically, in which four of the series in question were against England and the West Indies, who were the two finalists of the World T20 competition in 2016. In terms of his batting, he has a T20I average of 26.73 with a high score of 76 not out over the span of 41 matches. The other two options were Jos Buttler and MS Dhoni. Jos Buttler is good for destructive batting but is less impressive as a wicket-keeper, and as we have AB de Villiers in the team for six-hitting, we wanted a specialist wicket-keeper. MS Dhoni meanwhile has not played regular international cricket, is not consistent enough with the bat and is much older, meaning Sarfraz gets the nod.
The player filling the all-rounder role was a choice between Ben Stokes, Shakib al-Hasan, Hardik Pandya and Chris Morris. We thought at the moment, Ben Stokes is not in good enough form and after recent controversies should probably not make the team, while Shakib is similarly not in form. Chris Morris' batting credentials are not as good as the others and as you'll see, the pace bowling is just about covered so he can't make the team on bowling alone. We chose Hardik Pandya due to his great batting form and useful pace bowling, as he would be a great sixth bowling choice and he is also a very handy finisher in T20 cricket. Hardik Pandya has already amassed 1362 runs in T20 cricket, with a high score of 86 not out and has hit nearly as many sixes as fours in his T20 career, making him an ideal finisher in our team. Hardik's bowling has been possibly even more impressive. With a best of 3/7 in T20 and 3/8 in T20Is, he has an average of 28.77 over 96 games, with 62 wickets in all.
