Pakistan’s star batter, Babar Azam, faced a fierce blow in the groin area during net practice against pacer, Khurram Shehzad. A recent video from the practice session has gone viral, where it can be seen that the ball jagged back and beat the defense of Azam to strike into his groin area.
Azam could be seen going down in severe pain and taking his time to get back up. He seemed to be struggling after the hit in the area that he would not have liked. This scare comes just a week before the start of the two match Test series between Pakistan and Bangladesh from August 21.
Even after getting up, he could be seen struggling badly to face the next deliveries and after some deliveries, the ball castled his stumps. Azam was definitely struggling with pain right from the time the ball hit his groin area.
Babar Azam has been out of touch since a long time
Pakistan’s star batter hasn’t had the best of time since the opening match against Nepal in Asia Cup 2023, where he scored a century. Azam has not scored any century since that game. He has faced immense criticism for his batting failures, his inability to stand up on pressure moments and also his captaincy flaws.
He had a below par ODI World Cup 2023 as a batter and a dismal World Cup as a captain. Azam scored 320 runs from 9 matches and Pakistan were knocked out of the group stage. Azam has to leave his captaincy duties and Shaheen Shah Afridi was made the T20I captain with Shan Masood serving as the Test captain.
However, ahead of the T20 World Cup, he was again made the captain in the limited overs format. Azam’s strike-rate in T20Is came into question as Pakistan lost against India and the USA to get knocked out of the group stage in T20 World Cup 2024.
Reports about dressing room feud between Babar and Shaheen Shah Afridi came up with the head coach, Gary Kirsten suggesting that he has not seen a broken dressing room like that of Pakistan. Azam will be under pressure to deliver for Pakistan in the Test series against Bangladesh. He has played 52 Test matches so far and has scored 3898 runs with 45.5 average and 9 hundreds to his name.
