VIDEO COURTESY: ICC

Mohammad Rizwan- Pakistan post-match press conference, 23 Feb '25
[Reporter:]

Rizwan, I'm sure you're disappointed like everyone else. What do you think is the biggest reason for the defeat? And Kohli has always scored against Pakistan. People say he is out of form. He plays against us and scores a century.

[Mohammad Rizwan:]

First, let's talk about Virat Kohli. I am surprised at his hard work. He must have worked so hard. The world says he is out of form, but he comes to such big matches, which the world is waiting for, and he easily hits the ball – and this is where we don’t want to give him runs. But he plays and gets away from us, and he gets the runs off the ball. I will definitely praise his fitness level and hard work, the way he has done it. Because he is a cricketer and we are also cricketers. We tried very hard to get him out, but he took the game away. He has done a lot of hard work. The whole world said he was out of form - But he did it in this big match. As far as the match is concerned, you are disappointed of course. Because when you lose, you have a difficult day, difficult things come up, questions come up. But if you look at it all, you can't say there was a mistake in any department, except if you look at the bowling of Abrar, which was the most positive in this match. We have not made any mistakes. All three departments have made mistakes. That's why we are losing the match.

[Reporter:]

Do you think the middle order was not good enough? And did you feel you lack spinners? Did you feel the spinners were not good enough?

[Mohammad Rizwan:]

Yes, the middle order was not good enough. The players performed well before this – I’ll give you’ll an explanation, because yesterday in our meeting we had discussed that on this pitch around 270 – 280 runs would be enough to score. Because the outfield was slow, the pitch was slow. So, the ball wasn't going in the gaps. If we would have scored 280 maybe the results would be different today. But me and Saud tried to build a partnership and took a lot of time. But after that the shot selection was poor and that’s where they got a chance to take our wickets. After that our middle order maybe couldn’t take the pressure and we couldn’t manage.

[Reporter:]

The coach said yesterday that the pace attack was your strength. But looking back, do you think having only one specialist spinner was a mistake?

[Mohammad Rizwan:]

No, you can't say anything like that – that we did a mistake by picking just one spinner. If you look at that Indian team also they have Kuldeep as the front-line spinner. Jadeja is like an rounder, Axar Patel is like a rounder. We also have Salman Ali Agha - he bowled very well in other countries as well and Khushdil Shah, they bowled very well like in the past.

We need wickets in that particular time in ODIs especially. If we didn't take wickets in the middle overs - you can't win the matches. But this is a question, I will give you an answer to that. Like we all have three who always performed well, Shaheen, Naseem, and Haris, they performed very well. But today was not a day you can't say like that.

[Reporter:]

I think the game was very difficult because of the basic mistakes. When you and Saud Shakeel both got out early. Then Jadeja took another wicket. After that, two regulation catches were missed. So, it felt like when you were approaching this match, it was a timid approach that when you got such a big partnership in the middle overs, despite that, you were only able to make a total of 245-45.

[Mohammad Rizwan:]

Look, honestly, we made the same mistake that we have been making in the past with four matches. We didn't make a mistake in this match that we made a new mistake. In the past, we have been making the same mistake with four matches. We are working on it. We are human, our team is human - Mistakes will keep happening.

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