Pakistan T20I skipper Shaheen Afridi has praised former skipper and batter Babar Azam for keeping the team hunt in all three T20Is despite the Men in Green ending up on the losing side. Babar scored a fifty in all three T20Is of the five-match series but couldn’t get support at the other end. As a result, Pakistan now trail 0-3 in the series with two more T20Is to be played.

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“I had also said earlier that Babar was not out of form. We cannot judge him based on a few innings. He has played three fine innings in three matches in the series. He could not finish the matches in our favour. He needed someone at the other end to take the innings deeper. If there was another batter at the other end with Babar, we could have finished the game in our favour,” said Afridi in the post-match press conference after the loss in third T20I in Dunedin

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Babar scored 57 in the first game in Auckland on January 12 but Pakistan lost the match by 46 runs while chasing 227 and could manage only 180. In the second match on January 14 in Hamilton, the batter hit 66 but his team again lost the game – this time by 21 runs while chasing 195.

In the third T20I on Wednesday (January 17), Babar scored 58 in a chase of 225 but the team lost by 45 runs, managing just 179/7 in 20 overs. No other Pakistan batter has been able to score a single fifty in all three games apart from Babar except Fakhar Zaman (50) in the second T20I.

Overall, Babar has 181 runs in the series so far – behind only New Zealand opener Finn Allen who has 245 runs in as many games. Allen, who scored 34 in the first T20I, went on to hit 74 in the second match before scoring a blistering 137 in the third match on January 17.

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