Pakistan head coach Grant Bradburn backs misfiring top-order to do well in World Cup 2023

For the past few games, Pakistan's top order has been going through a dry patch and Fakhar Zaman has been the most prominent out of the two.

Hyderabad: Pakistan head coach Grant Bradburn has expressed confidence in their underperforming top-order ahead of their clash against Sri Lanka on Wednesday.

For the past few games, Pakistan’s top order has been going through a dry patch and Fakhar Zaman has been the most prominent out of the two.

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The left-handed batter had a below-par Asia Cup as he scored 66 runs in four matches. His barren patch continued in the warm-up games as well as he scored 22 runs against Australia.

Due to their struggle in the opening half of the batting set-up, Pakistan has struggled to finish the powerplay on a positive note.

But, despite their ongoing struggle, Bradburn has shown his full trust in the top-order and said in the pre-match conference,”So, look, we’ve got full faith in our top order. They will click at some stage. And we’re open and honest to say that we’re not getting what we would like out of the Powerplay as yet. But we’re certainly very happy with other phases of our game which have kicked into gear and did enough the other night to get over the line and create a W, create two points for us coming out of that dressing room which was the ultimate goal.”

He went on to talk about how they focus on different phases of the game in order to compensate for the lack of firepower in the top order.

“Okay, as I said before we’re not getting what we would like to get out of our Powerplay but fortunately, we also we look at it as six phases of the game. There’s the Powerplay, the mid phase, and the close, obviously, in both innings. So, our simple focus is to win more of those phases than the opposition, and you generally win the game,” Bradburn said.

“So, while it’s clear to see that we haven’t been getting the dynamic results out of our batting Powerplay that we would like, our full faith is with all of our players that could take up that position. We’ve got four to five options that we could put out at the top of the order and we’d be very confident that they can deliver not only the runs but the tempo that we want to play at. We want to create a tempo for the middle order and the back end of our innings to build from. We’re not getting that at the moment, so those are discussions that we’re having, but we’ve got full faith in all of our options at the top,” Bradburn added.

Pakistan will face Sri Lanka at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium on Tuesday.