Pakistan’s new T20 captain Salman Ali Agha on Tuesday promised a new approach in the shortest format, saying his team will play fearless cricket as it prepares for the upcoming tournaments. Agha, who was on Tuesday named Pakistan captain for the five-match T20I tour of New Zealand beginning March 16, said the selectors had picked a new look side because there was a need to play fearless cricket. “I am honoured to be Pakistan captain but it is also a challenge for me. We have mostly picked youngsters in the T20 squad. My task is to get players to play fearless and high risk cricket,” he said after his appointment.

“We will obviously face failures but we all need to support these players. They would be told to play freely. Nowadays there is no other option in the T20 format than to play fearless cricket.” He said there was a need to play with a different mindset in T20s and the selected players will be assured they will not be dropped even if they face some failures.

“Having Shadab Khan as vice captain will also be good as he and I think with the same aggressive mindset and we will collectively try to groom attacking players.” Agha also defended the selection of Shadab in the T20 squad, saying Pakistan were short on quality all-rounders in Test and white-ball formats.

“Shadab has experience and nowadays you need players who can also bat with their wrist spin.” Interim head coach Aaqib Javed made it clear that while Babar Azam and Muhammad Rizwan had been dropped from the T20 squad, they are not out of the picture for the future assignments.

“We are now trying to focus on a pool of 24-25 players looking to the Asia Cup and World Cup and we will not just depend on the 15-16 selected for this tour.” The Asia Cup will be held later this year while the T20 World Cup will be staged in 2026.

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