da apostaganha： Rival captains Steve Waugh and Waqar Younis have contrasting opinions onthe first act of the second cricket Test starting in Sharjah.
AAP11-Oct-2002Rival captains Steve Waugh and Waqar Younis have contrasting opinions onthe first act of the second cricket Test starting in Sharjah.Waugh, who will playing his 150th game, repeated his mantra as captainthat the toss is “over-rated” and said it would play no part in theoutcome.Waqar, who has captained Pakistan to two crushing wins over the WestIndies at this ground after winning the toss and batting first, said thetoss will be vital.”It will be an important toss because it will be hard to bat later onthe game,” Waqar said.”The wicket gets slower and slower as the days go on.”And this pitch looks a little slower than a normal Sharjah pitch – thislooks more scuffy and might spin a bit more and reverse swing a bitbetter.”With that in mind, Pakistan will take in an extra spinner, DanishKaneria, ahead of medium pacer Mohammad Sami and will expect another bigcontribution from Shoaib Akhtar with his reverse swing speciality.”The guy’s bowling really well .. I’m hoping for him to produce the sameperformance in this game, maybe better,” Waqar said of Shoaib.Australia hasn’t yet decided on its line-up, with the bowling being thehardest puzzle to solve.Off-spinner Nathan Hauritz and pace man Andy Bichel appear to be in ahead-to-head contest to replace the injured Jason Gillespie but Waughhinted Australia would go with a traditional line-up of three pacebowlers plus Shane Warne.”We pretty much know our game plan and we’ve played with a similarattack for a long time – it doesn’t matter too much what the pitch islike we’ll still play our style of cricket – I don’t think we’ll changetoo much,” Waugh said.”I think the pitch going to hold together pretty well … that sort ofpitch suits us, a hard, flat one where you have to work hard and show abit of patience – we play good cricket on that type of wicket.”Australia won the first Test by 41 runs in Colombo to lead the series1-0.