Pakistan's Mohammad Yousuf vowed Thursday to fight on as skipper despite a hint from the country's cricket chief that a new captain would be appointed after Test and one-day drubbings in Australia.
Pakistan's Mohammad Yousuf vowed Thursday to fight on as skipper despite a hint from the country's cricket chief that a new captain would be appointed after Test and one-day drubbings in Australia.
Pakistan's 3-0 whitewash in the Test series and 5-0 routing in the one-day series forced chief selector Iqbal Qasim to resign and put pressure on Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Ijaz Butt to quit.
Butt last week hinted at a change in the captaincy.
"Ideally, a younger player could have been chosen to lead Pakistan, but Australia is not the place to experiment. So the choice fell on the senior-most player Yousuf," Butt said in a television report.
"Now we would like to hand over the reins to a younger captain," he added.
But Yousuf, who was handed the captaincy only after Younus Khan withdrew from the tour of New Zealand and the Australia Tests due to lack of form, said he would not step down.
"If the chief selector has resigned it's his thinking," Yousuf told reporters on his return from Australia Thursday. "I didn't do badly as captain, not as badly that I should resign or quit."
"I accepted captaincy when no one was willing to take captaincy for the tours. I took it (captaincy) only because of the country and will continue for the country in future," he added.
Yousuf said Butt's statement had not been good for team morale as it had raised uncertainty about who would be the next captain.
The 35-year-old master batsman, who has not been selected for the one-off Twenty20 match in Melbourne on Friday, defended the team's showing after they slumped to their fourth successive 3-0 series defeat against Australia, saying they had fought well in the first two Tests but were short of experience.
"Under the circumstances we went there, I think we did well to draw the series in New Zealand. Our players were inexperienced but I think we did well in the Australia Tests," said Yousuf.
Yousuf said Shahid Afridi's ball-tampering in the fifth and final one-day international in Perth, for which he was handed a ban of two Twenty20 matches, was not good for the image of Pakistan cricket.
Pakistan drew their Test series against New Zealand 1-1
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