Former Pakistan captain Salman Butt identifies three fittest players in the Pakistan cricket team ahead of the two-Test series against Bangladesh which begins on August 21 in Rawalpindi.
Butt, 39, raised concerns that the team’s fitness preparation is not going the way it should have but the former cricketer named Shan Masood, Mohammad Rizwan and Fakhar Zaman as the fittest players in the team and among the top 10 cricketers in the world.
"Improvements will be seen in fitness soon. You cannot say all the players are not fit. If you look at some of the players they are among the top 10 players in terms of fitness in World cricket. You can look at Shan Masood, Fakhar Zaman, and Mohammad Rizwan, you look at their fitness, they have achieved good scores in the Yo-Yo Tests. They are good in the gym, they run well on the field," Butt said while talking on YouTube.
"You need to manage fast bowlers, the problem is they don't play longer format, they don't feature in FC cricket, we don't play much Test cricket. Things are not getting developed in the way they should be. When this happens, the entire team is blamed unfit, people won't look at fit guys even though all the players are hardworking," he said.
Butt cited the example of Babar Azam as the 29-year-old scored a lot of hundreds in the last two years and said that maintaining fitness is the players’ responsibility.
"Babar Azam scored truckloads of runs in the last 2 years, he proved his fitness, he ran on the field, and scored runs while batting first as well as second innings. Things should go up but they are getting broken in the middle, which is wrong. So, this is the responsibility of the players to maintain their fitness," he said.
"The entire Pakistan is talking about the fitness of the team and it brought a storm in Pakistan, players at the junior level were asked to run. This came after people said players weren't fit in the T20 World Cup 2024. No one questioned the physios or trainers, but instead, they started making players at the district level push hard for fitness. Those who made errors are still there," he concluded.
