“What An Absolute Road,” NZ Pacer Mitchell McClenaghan & Twitter Mock Pak’s “Highway” Pitches

The Pakistan Cricket is certainly not going through a good phase as a lot has happened in the Pakistan Cricket Board and few controversies have also erupted in the past few days. While Najam Sethi has replaced Ramiz Raja as the chief of PCB and they both are leaving no chance of slamming each other, the new chief selector Shahid Afridi is not only making changes in the squad but he is also coming up with new rules for selection in the team, for example recently he made a rule as per which a batter needs to have a strike rate of more than 135 for getting selected in the T20 team.

As far as performance of the Pakistani cricket team is concerned, it has been disappointing and though Babar Azam was the leading run-scorer of the world in the year 2022 across all the formats yet as a skipper, he failed in making his team win the Asia Cup 2022 and the ICC T20 World Cup 2022. Talking about test matches, Pakistan got whitewashed by Ben Stokes-led England by 3-0 and prior to that, Pak also lost the 3-match test series to Australia by 1-0. This was the first time that Pakistan lost 4 test matches in row at home and fans slammed not only the cricketers but the board as well for preparing batting friendly pitches.

The condition of pitches is still the same as the recently concluded first test match of the 2-match test series against New Zealand ended in a draw and in the second test match which is being played at National Stadium Karachi, the visitors have once again posted a good total of 449 in their first innings.

Pakistan cricket fans were already annoyed with the quality of pitches and were slamming the PCB for preparing this type of pitches, alleging that the board is doing this in order to help Babar Azam in scoring centuries so that he can become the number one rank batter of the world but this time, a New Zealand pacer took to Twitter and called the pitch ‘an absolute road’.

The Kiwi pacer Mitchell McClenaghan posted of Twitter, “What an absolute road. Batters dream! #PAKvNZ”

Soon netizens started reacting to this tweet and here are some selected reactions:

#1

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https://twitter.com/Memepura/status/1609835242650734592

#9

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https://twitter.com/ImSudarshan67/status/1609813813318283265

#11

As far as the test match is concerned, New Zealand batters Tom Latham (71), Devon Conway (122), Tome Blundell (51) and Matt Henry (68) played brilliant knocks and helped their team in posting a total of 449 runs in the first innings.

On the day 2 of the game, Pakistan has scored 100 runs on the loss of 3 wickets with Imam-ul-Haq (35) and Saud Shakeel (0) on the crease.