Rashid Khan is the backbone of the team: Asghar Afghan

Team Afghanistan has seen a lot during their cricketing journey, and the players have come a long way as a unit. And one player, who is most talked about in the team is the ace spin-bowling all-rounder Rashid Khan. His former teammate Asghar Afghan was all praises for the spinner and said that Rashid Khan was the backbone of the team.

Rashid Khan is currently a major component of the team at the Asia Cup 2022 which is happening in the UAE. In Afghanistan’s first game against Sri Lanka, the bowlers did the main job as they dished out the opposition lineup for a very low total of 105 runs. While several bowlers picked up wickets, Rashid Khan went wicketless, but bowled a brilliant spell at an economy of 3.00, giving away just 12 runs in his four-over quota.

While speaking on BatBricks7 Presents Run Ki Runneeti show on CricTracker, Asghar emphasized on the importance of having a player of Rashid Khan’s caliber on their side as he said:

“Rashid Khan is the backbone of the team, and there’s no doubt about that. When you see Afghanistan’s first game against Sri Lanka and look at Rashid’s performance, he bowled brilliantly. The amount of cricket I’ve played with him, and from how much I’ve seen him play under my captaincy, I have noticed one thing that every batter’s strategy is to not give away his wicket to Rashid.”

No batter ever tries to experiment against Rashid: Asghar

Asghar Afghan believes that the opposition batters would never take the risk of going big against Rashid Khan, and hitting the spinner for runs. He said that Rashid has a tendency of adding pressure on the batters with his bowling abilities, and thus the batters only try to play defensive off his deliveries.

“The thing is, no batter ever tries to experiment against Rashid. As a former captain and a player, I would suggest the team to send in Rashid into the attack as much late as possible, because the batter would look to score runs and try some shots off Rashid’s delivery. But when they do it, they’ll tend to make mistakes and lose their wicket under pressure,” he added.

"Like in case of the game against Sri Lanka, he put a lot of pressure on the opposition batters, and as a result they just looked for a way to tackle him to not lose their wickets. They did not attempt to hit Rashid’s ball and the pressure built up. But when they tried to do it against other bowlers, they kept losing wickets. Thus, the batters don’t want to take any risk while facing Rashid,” he concluded.