We are forgetting another bowler who should have been there in place of Sami and that is Sohail Tanveer.
Sohail Tanvit a Twenty-20 or death-ODI bowler. He bowls straight-forwardly, and very accurately, but he is not a big swinger of the ball and isn't as crafty as, say, Mohammad Asif. Of course, Mohammad Sami isn't very crafty either, but he can swing, he can bounce and he has pace. Mohammad Aamer probably has the best combibation of all, speed, bounce, craft, aggression, and a very smart way of going about his bowling. He's probably the best fast-bowling talent to have been discovered by Pakistan since the retirement of the Ws, with all due respect to Asif, Gul, Tanvir, Akhtar, and company.
The Australian batting line-up is not as fragile as New Zealand's, and they are used to playing on their home ground. It is going to be very difficult to go in with a young and mentally questionable bowling attack and perform well. The slack will have to be picked up by our batting department, something that seems nearly impossible. This is why I am all for giving Shoaib Malik another shot, he is, at least on paper, an all-rounder. Starting from Aamer who can defend the ball, then Gul, then Kaneria, and then Asif, we have a tail that is longer than the Indus river. We can't possibly hope to score decent amounts of runs with this tail, leaving our bowlers with an agonizing amount of work to do. All this despite the fact that these are the only four bowlers we have. We are in dire needs of all-reounders. If we could, somehow, bat down to number 7 or 8, we might have a shot at posting competitive scores, and hence we might have a chance of winning the series.
Our bowling can match their bowling, I have little doubt. It's the batting that we need to re-inforce, hopefully
not at the expense of the bowlers. If not Malik, then at the very least, Afridi or Razzaq should be taken along. I think Afridi has matured enough to understand the requirements of Test cricket. He is, after all, the captain of our T20 side.
