Time for Umar to a take a leaf out of Kamran Akmal's book, says McCullum

SHARJAH: Lahore Qalandars skipper Brendon McCullum has advised under-fire batsman Umar Akmal to take a leaf out of Kamran Akmal's book, after the elder Akmal stood up for his team in Peshawar Zalmi's last PSL league match on Friday.

Umar was dropped from the Qalandars playing squad after consecutive failures as the batsman could score only 57 runs in five innings, while his brother Kamran scored a tremendous match-winning century to help Peshawar Zalmi chase a mammoth target against Qalandars.

"Umar is an incredible talent but he has had his issues which are well documented around this place as well. His consistency wasn't there. And that's why we had to look outside of the experience of Umar Akmal,"  McCullum said about the decision to drop Akmal from the Qalandars playing squad.

"Based on his point of view, he has a lot of years in front of him, he can finish his career really strong. Today, he got a great blueprint of what he should do from his brother and I am sure he sat back and thought he could be in a situation like this in the future. But he has to make sure that he is performing to get those opportunities," said the former former New Zealand captain.

Talking about Qalandars' performance in the third edition of the PSL, the flamboyant batsman said everyone in the camp was disappointed with the way the team had performed in the tournament.

"We are really disappointed that we are out of the tournament. We had high hopes when we came into the tournament. I thought we really did well in the drafts. We saw a couple of injuries, which affected some of the quality of players we had. We took too long to find our feet," he said.

"Probably, we could have made changes a bit earlier, but at the time we were just trying to put our head down and make sure things were working out the best they could. In the end, we lost three of the first six games, while we could have won every single one of those," he said.

One thing that delighted him was the way the young guys stood up and performed. "We have discovered real quality players," he said.

He further stated that the last 10 days had been positive for Qalandars as some youngsters showed their potential by performing well under pressure.

"I think if we look at Agha Salman, Sohail Akhtar, Gulraiz, Shaheen Shah…those guys performed really well in the last 10-12 days when we were under pressure. For these guys to stand up and perform like that was very positive. It might have been disappointing, but it's not all gloom and doom…there are positives to take out from there," he said while talking about the positives for Qalandars despite another dismal PSL campaign.

Speaking about the team's last match, Brendon hailed the performance of Zalmi's Kamran Akmal and termed the wicketkeeper-batsman as one of the most explosive players in the world.

"On his day, Kamran is one the most explosive players in the world. What he showed today was just another example of that. The wicket got a little bit better and we couldn't quite execute as well what we could have but at the same time he put us under immense pressure. Though 170 was actually quite a pretty good score, but when someone like Kamran comes up and plays like that, you've got to give credit where the credit is due. He played an outstanding innings and won the game," he said.