Pakistan ignore Babar and Rizwan for Asia Cup
The 17-member team, led by Salman Agha, will play a T20 tri-series in the UAE featuring the hosts as well as Afghanistan in their buildup to the Asia Cup, the Pakistan Cricket Board said in a statement on Sunday.
Babar and Rizwan were not picked for the T20 leg of Pakistan's West Indies tour this month, where they were beaten 2-1 by the hosts.
Pacer Shaheen Afridi has been retained while opener Fakhar Zaman, who suffered a hamstring injury in the West Indies, has been included for the Sept 9-28 tournament.
Pakistan will begin their Group A campaign against Oman in Dubai on September 12 before meeting arch-rivals India at the same venue two days later.
Pakistan squad: Salman Agha (captain), Abrar Ahmed, Faheem Ashraf, Fakhar Zaman, Haris Rauf, Hasan Ali, Hasan Nawaz, Hussain Talat, Khushdil Shah, Mohammad Haris (wicketkeeper), Mohammad Nawaz, Mohammad Waseem Jr, Sahibzada Farhan, Saim Ayub, Salman Mirza, Shaheen Afridi and Sufyan Moqim.
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BBC News
17 minutes ago
- BBC News
Hampshire thrash Surrey with over 30 overs to spare
Excellent bowling from veteran seamer James Fuller, inexperienced slow left-armer Andrew Neal and pacy youngster Manny Lumsden proved too much for Surrey in what became an embarrassingly one-sided nine-wicket Hampshire Hawks dismissed Surrey for 160 in 46.3 overs at the Oval before skipper Nick Gubbins anchored a buccaneering chase with 87 not out from 60 balls. Hampshire's fourth win in five Group A matches, clinched with a massive 30.5 overs to spare, boosts their ambitions of qualification for the Metro Bank One-Day Cup knock-out stages. Gubbins was initially joined in an opening partnership of 54 with Ali Orr (27) before Fletcha Middleton arrived to hit an unbeaten 35 from 24 balls in an unbroken second wicket stand of 108 in just 9.3 bowler Nathan Barnwell was thrashed for 50 from his three overs – Gubbins twice hoicking him for six in an opening over costing 21 – and left-arm spinner Yousuf Majid's three overs went for 31 as Gubbins and Middleton accelerated brutally towards the finish line. Gubbins hit three sixes and 13 fours in all, while Middleton's contribution was two sixes and four 35-year-old Fuller finished with 4-34 after polishing off a Surrey innings that never got going and was in danger of complete implosion at 89-6 before keeper-batsman Josh Blake and bowlers James Taylor, Barnwell and Majid provided at least some lower order resistance in front of a near-5,000 was Surrey's joint top-scorer with 22 alongside South Asian Cricket Academy graduate Nikhil Gorantla, who was Fuller's first victim when he was excellently caught low down by Neal diving forward at mid-on in the 18th left Surrey 68-3 and Lumsden had already made his mark by then, first forcing Rory Burns to miscue a pull to his fourth ball – to be caught and bowled for 20 – and then seeing Adam Thomas chop on to his stumps for 12 in his third 16 years and 288 days, Lumsden bowled with genuine pace in just his second List A appearance and although there were a number of wild deliveries, including an intended bouncer that flew for four wides, he impressed across two spells in his 2-46 from 10 more impressive was 25-year old spinner Neal, who played two first-class matches for Leeds-Bradford MCCU in 2019, but only made the first of his previous four List A appearances earlier this 3-33 from 10 nicely-controlled overs now gives him nine wickets in the competition and he numbered the Surrey middle-order of Ben Foakes, Ollie Sykes and Cameron Steel as his mishit to long on for five, Sykes was brilliantly held by a diving Felix Organ at long on for seven and Steel drove tamely to short extra cover to go for 22 was ended by a fatal nibble at Fuller, Taylor (19) offered a few meaty blows before skying Scottish all-rounder Brandon McMullen to long on and Barnwell departed for 15 miscuing high to keeper Ben was left 13 not out when No 11 Alex French fenced Fuller to slip to go for a fifth ball duck and all that remained was to see how quickly Hampshire's top order could knock off the runs. Thanks to Gubbins, Orr and Middleton the match was over by report supplied by ECB Reporters Network, supported by Rothesay Tuesday fixture Group AUtilita Bowl: Hampshire v Notts OutlawsPlay starts 11:00 BST
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
County cricket: One-Day Cup shows its worth with entertaining tussles
The One-Day Cup is already at the halfway point of the round robin stage, with the top three in each group qualifying for the knockout matches to come in just 10 days' time. Without peeking, do you know how your county is doing? Compact competitions are often easier to follow than those that sprawl across the calendar or stop and start – I'm looking at you, T20 Blast – but, notwithstanding the chronic under-reporting of the One-Day Cup, is it possible to define a narrative at all? Matches are scheduled every day – except the days that they're not, like last Saturday, this Saturday and next (bank holiday) Monday – and there are no defined gameweeks after which one can look at the table, take stock and consider what is to come. As with much else in cricket, it could all be done better for fans, players and sponsors. And they are the constituencies that really matter, aren't they? Gloucestershire top Group A with the only 100% record in the country, which is especially impressive given they are one of the counties past the midpoint of their league campaign having played five matches. It would take an unlikely combination of results to deny them a slot in the knockouts, but the clever structure of eliminations, byes and home advantages means there is still a lot to play for once they, or anyone else, progresses to the next phase. As if to underline my point above, how many non-Gloucestershire fans could name their captain? A hint: he also held aloft last year's Blast trophy. The name you're looking for is Jack Taylor. Taylor, a batter who bowls, came to the crease at Worcester after Oliver Price's 66 and immediately lost Ben Charlesworth after his handy 50. Not a crisis but, with 80 needed off 17 overs, four down, Worcestershire had the first sniff of a win in a match they had been chasing since losing the toss. Taylor compiled a half century and steered his team home in the company of fellow old pro Graeme van Buuren. In the brave new world that always hovers just beyond the grasp of administrators looking at the product and its content, there might not be a place for the likes of Taylor and Van Buuren. They have never played senior international cricket and probably never will. They will be surplus to requirements on the powerpoints that dazzle the tech bros who are the pipers about to call the domestic cricket tune with their franchise riches. Ask any fan if these players should have a place in the English game come 2027 and I suspect the answer will be rather different. Professional sport is mainly a young person's thing, a brutal sifting of winners and losers – no wonder some find it a tough path to follow. Ali Orr was one of the Sussex youngsters given a chance in those strange Covid summers and named in this column back in 2021 as a bright prospect along with Tom Haines, Aaron Thomason, Danial Ibrahim, Jack Carson, Henry Crocombe and Jamie Atkins. Injury, a move to Hampshire, and navigating changes and setbacks meant that the last of his seven centuries came in May 2024. He ended that barren spell with a 131 against Leicestershire. Orr and his captain Nick Gubbins put together an opening stand of 202, making the win a formality and keeping Hampshire well placed to finish in the top three. Orr is still only 24 and that knock could be the start of his second coming of a fine batter. Group B is tighter, with five counties in with a decent shout of qualifying and even sixth-placed Durham not out of it yet. Yorkshire, with Imam-ul-Haq back after missing the defeat against Somerset at York, travelled to Radlett to play Middlesex for the honour of leading the standings after five games. Though the prolific Pakistani notched an undefeated half century, the match was won by Yorkshire's bowlers, who had the home side five for three and then 129 all out, the match done in 58 overs. The damage was inflicted by the ever-reliable Ben 'Betsy' Coad (three for 26 in his 10 overs) and Matt Milnes (four for 29 from his eight). Both seamers are 31 and know their games inside out, making them an ideal pair for a competition like this. Milnes, who will return to Kent at the end of the summer after three years at Headingley, will be motivated to leave with a trophy. You wouldn't bet against it. The hard-fought tussle between Sussex and Lancashire a sun-kissed Hove underlined just how fine a format 50-over cricket can be. It was a match that ebbed and flowed before aforementioned Carson became the late hero. Lancashire's openers pinged some friendly bowling to the boundary in the powerplay, Michael Jones's 82 off 77 the highlight, before Sussex's spinners, Carson and Archie Lenham, pulled things back. Some pyrotechnics from Harry Singh took Lancashire up to 338 for seven, a score they must have felt confident in defending. At 241 for one after 33 overs, that confidence had evaporated like ice-cream dropped on the promenade pavement, but the impressive Arav Shetty snared Tom Clark for a brilliant 139, then nabbed Fynn Hudson-Prentice and John Simpson in short order and, when Tom Haines went for 90, the anchor was gone and the home side were all at sea, 54 off nine overs suddenly very distant. Calm heads were required and few were clearer in their thinking than Carson, who turned into peak Michael Bevan, finishing matters with good running and two sixes just when his team needed them. The result was still in doubt until the third ball of the last over was clobbered to the fence by No 11 Sean Hunt, giving Sussex a home victory. It's not a bad game is it? Just to show it was no fluke, Somerset and Warwickshire served up another cracker two days later at Taunton. Tom Lammonby notched a round 100, somewhat surprisingly his first in white-ball cricket, before the Rew brothers inevitably got in on the act with 81 (James) and 41 (Thomas). But, from 218 for three with more than 10 overs still to come, a target of just 310 gave Warwickshire a chance they might not have expected. The visitors developed a habit of losing wickets at a bad time, the top seven all getting in but nobody topping Rob Yates's 47. Cue Jake Lintott, back in his home town and in at No 8 with 67 needed at just more than a run a ball. He bagged 50 of them himself in the company of wicketkeeper Kai Smith and, when he was done, so was the match. Both sides are locked on 12 points in second and third, with both playing their last group matches at home. If it does go to the wire, the noise will be big. This article is from The 99.94 Cricket Blog
Times
5 hours ago
- Times
Betrayal and bravery of Hansie Cronje, by the person he confessed to
April 11, 2000, just after 2.30am. An executive suite of the Elangeni Hotel overlooking the Indian Ocean on Durban's Golden Mile. 'All the lights were on: it was as bright as day even though it was the middle of the night,' Rory Steyn recalls. 'Hansie's kit bag was packed and lying by the door. As I walked in, he proffered this three-page handwritten document, saying, 'You might have realised that some of the stuff that's been said about me in the media is true.' ' Hansie Cronje, the captain and poster boy of the post-apartheid South Africa cricket team, is about to bear his soul. Days before this impromptu rendezvous, the Delhi police had made public allegations of match-fixing against Cronje which related to a one-day international series in India that year. Attention would soon turn to a previous tour to the same country in 1996, and the rain-ravaged Test against England in Centurion in January 2000, when Cronje convinced the visitors to join the Proteas in sacrificing an innings to set up a final-day run chase. It later emerged he had been paid by a bookmaker to engineer a result. That October, the South African government-appointed King Commission banned Cronje from playing or coaching cricket for life. Herschelle Gibbs and Henry Williams, two team-mates he had attempted to coerce into spot-fixing, were banned from international cricket for six months. Steyn, now 62, was the first person to whom Cronje confessed. A man whose working life has also encompassed stints as the chief of the South African police's VIP unit and then as the head of President Mandela's personal protection team, the father of the Glasgow Warriors and Scotland wing Kyle Steyn was also in charge of security for the All Blacks at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, when preparations for the final against the host nation Springboks were overshadowed by allegations of a deliberate poisoning of their food by a hotel waitress. Steyn, then, has long been used to juggling all manner of dangers and delights, but nothing could have prepared him for the scene when he answered Cronje's early-morning distress call. The pair were staying on different floors of the same hotel, Steyn as the head of security for the touring Australia team and Cronje as the skipper of the South Africa side due to face them in an ODI at Kingsmead that day. Instead, the then 30-year-old was about to spill his guts to a man who had become a familiar face around the Proteas camp as he guarded all manner of visiting teams, including the Mike Atherton-led 1995 expedition, England's first post-apartheid tour to South Africa. 'At that point, I had actually left the police to become the first ever safety and security consultant to Cricket South Africa, but the best I can come up with was that Hansie still thought of me as a cop and so thought I was the right person to unburden himself to,' Steyn says. 'I'm good friends with Tugga [Steve Waugh] from working with the Australia team, and when this whole thing started to break, he said to me, 'I don't think there's nothing there.' But before I heard it from Hansie himself, I didn't for a second believe any of it. And now I'm trying to react to what I'm being told and at the same time trying to remember I have a job to fulfil. 'I had to wake up Dr [Ali] Bacher [the head of the United Cricket Board of South Africa]. He'd taken the Australian president and CEO out to a game lodge. They were in the sticks with no cell phone reception. I had to call the lodge and say, 'You've got to send a ranger with a rifle.' He would be walking through Big Five game territory to get to this lodge and alert Dr Bacher. 'When this police commissioner in Delhi called a press conference and made these allegations, Dr Bacher had called Hansie and said, 'I'm only going to ask you one question: is there any truth to any of this?' When Hansie said, 'No,' Dr Bacher said, 'That's fine, that's all I needed to hear. We will back you to the hilt.' 'Dr Bacher called the deputy minister of foreign affairs [Aziz Pahad] and objected in the strongest terms, saying, 'This is now a diplomatic issue, because he has accused our national captain.' In turn, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs went to the Indian High Commission and objected, then a week later, here was Hansie putting up his hand. 'He knew he had let his team-mates, his family, his country and himself down. And while I am, on the one hand, mad at him for letting all of us down, on the other, I do admire his bravery, because he came to a point where his upbringing, his background, his schooling, and just his own ethics made him say, 'I can't continue. I'm putting my hand up and I'm saying I was wrong.' Despite the fact he had betrayed so much trust, I will always admire that: when you mess up, you own it.' Steyn says that even now he is 'genuinely torn' when it comes to how he views the fallen icon. 'I'm so mad at him and so disappointed because he was a proper hero to South Africa. Right across the colour board, probably the first white person to be truly universally loved. You could say Francois Pienaar, because he won the [Rugby] World Cup in 1995, but he wasn't as publicly loved as Hansie was. It was said that after President Mandela, Hansie was the most popular South African. 'He was elegant, supremely talented and self-confident. Through the captaincy decisions that he made, it was like watching a guy play chess. People trusted him and got behind him. That's what the whole country did and why that feeling of being sold out was so hard to take.' Wrapped up in this sense of betrayal, however, was another approach that Steyn believes relates to the post-apartheid process of reconciliation. 'Hansie remained, and remains, hugely popular,' he confirms. 'As South Africans, we've had to look our demons in the eye. By no means are we out of the woods on that score, about the hurts and the wounds of the past, and the impact it has had on people's lives. But as a nation we have been prepared to do what Mandela urged when he said, 'It's better to sit down and talk to your enemy than to fight with him.' 'Think of the magnanimity that statement takes. I witnessed it up close the day he swore the oath of office. His car drove up to an old-school, apartheid-era police colonel. And he puts out his hand and says, 'Today you have become our police. From today forward there's no more you and us. You are our police too.' 'He started to cry, this old warrior. The president patted him on the shoulder and said, 'I just needed you to hear that from me.' 'That colonel represented the system that pursued Mandela and arrested him, tried him, convicted him and sent him to prison for life, narrowly escaping the death penalty. And on the very day he's got all the power, out comes, not the fist of retribution, but the hand of forgiveness. That takes a level of magnanimity and humanity that I don't know I have the words to describe. It made such a profound effect on me that I questioned everything I'd ever been brought up with as normal.' Steyn stayed in touch with Cronje, popping in to visit him down in George whenever client work with his own security company took him to the coast. He had also brokered a meeting between Cronje and Gerald Majola, Bacher's successor at the helm of the union, 'to try to find a way of making use of Hansie's great experience and his skills', but in June 2002, Cronje, aged only 32, died — the victim, alongside two pilots, of an air crash amid poor visibility on the outskirts of George. 'There is this quasi-conspiracy theory that he was murdered; that Hansie knew where too many skeletons were buried, and so he was offed, but the cop in me tells me that's rubbish,' Steyn says. 'The simple truth is that had befriended these mail pilots whom he would call at extremely short notice to see if they had a spare seat that night. 'What happened was desperately, desperately sad, not least because I'd had dinner with him not long before and he was really upbeat. He was doing an MBA, he'd been offered a job with Caterpillar, the earth-moving people, and he was getting his life back together. He wasn't quite ready to walk into a restaurant publicly but it was almost as if he had finally, to the extent that one can, put these demons behind him. But then this awful news. Again, you struggled to know what to say or even think.' Test debut/last Test April 18 1992 v West Indies March 2 2000 v India ODI debut/last ODIFebruary 26 1992 v Australia March 31 2000 v Pakistan Domestic teams played forFree State, Leicestershire, Ireland Records at Test level/ODIMatches: 68/188 Runs scored: 3,714/5,565 Batting average: 36.41/38.64 100s/50s: 6/23 — 2/39 Top score: 135/112 Balls bowled: 3,800/5,354 Best bowling: 3/14 — 5/32
