Selectors play musical chair with Afridi

Karachi, June 6: The selectors continued to play musical chair with Shahid Afridi when they dropped him from the 17-man team for the first leg of the Sri Lankan tour.

The first Test will be played at Galle between June 14 and 18 while the second and third Tests will be played at Colombo and Kandy respectively.

Afridi was the only change in the 14-man squad currently engaged Asia Cup. The selectors recalled Waqar Younis, Younis Khan and Mushtaq Ahmad after ignoring the trio for the Dhaka tournament and piccked 18-year-old uncapped rookie batsman Qaisar Abbas.

Afridi has been dropped from the squad for the Sri Lankan tour despite having been selected for the five-day matches on the West Indies tour. Ironically, he was tried in none of the three Tests. One may ask what was the purpose of having him on board then.

The hard hitting batsman had earned a place in the Test team after scoring 74 and 34 besides recording match figures of five for 90 against Sri Lanka in the last Test at Karachi in March.

"Shahid Afridi will be recalled for the triangular one-day contest which follows immediately after the Test series," director of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Yawar Saeed said from Lahore.

Afridi was also ignored for the three-Test series against Australia last year despite performing exceedingly well on the tour of India in which Pakistan played three Tests. Afridi had scored 140 odd in the Chennai Test which Pakistan won by 11 runs.

The selectors don't seem to have noted that the real weakness of the team during the West Indies tour lay in the batting and not bowling. The preference for Qaisar Abbas over an experienced Shahid Afridi lacks sense also in the background that they have recalled Younis Khan whose top score in the Caribbean was 23.

The selectors named four genuine fast bowlers and two seamers-cum-batsmen for the series which will, in all probability, be played on slow, turning tracks chiefly because of the presence of Muttiah Muralitharan in the ranks of the home team.

Muralitharan bagged 28 wickets when Sri Lanka played three Tests in Pakistan and won the series 2-1.

Surprisingly, there are two off-spinners and a leg-spinner but no left-arm spinner to add variety and punch to the team.