“Cricket definitely gave him a second chance” - Irfan Pathan slams Karun Nair for not capitalizing on the England tour

Former Team India all-rounder Irfan Pathan, while rating the Indian players on his YouTube channel, rated Karun Nair four out of ten for not properly utilizing the given chances on the England tour.

Interestingly, Nair’s best knock of the tour came in the first innings of the final Test at the Oval in London, when he scored 57 runs off 109 balls. However, barring that knock, Nair couldn’t make it big, failing to convert his scores into bigger ones.

Nair's scores on the England tour read - 0, 20, 31, 26, 40, 14, 57, and 17 as he could score only 205 runs from eight innings at a poor average of 25.62 with a strike rate of 52.56, having only one fifty throughout the tour. Interestingly, Nair had a tough time facing short balls in the five-Test series.

“Karun Nair gets four out of ten. Why? He didn’t look particularly poor throughout the series. He kept getting starts consistently but managed only one half-century. He got plenty of opportunities. Cricket definitely gave him a second chance, but he couldn’t capitalise on it the way he should have. Especially in the Lord’s Test, he had a real chance to win the match for India but couldn’t do it,” Irfan Pathan said on his YouTube channel.

“Other than that, it often seemed like he was playing well, building up nicely, and then suddenly, he’d play a loose shot and get out. At The Oval, when the bouncer was used against him, he looked a bit shaken and seemed more unsettled and uncomfortable. So, he gets four points," he added.

Nevertheless, India managed to level the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy 2-2, courtesy of exceptional performance from the Indian seamer Mohammed Siraj, who scalped a nine-wicket match haul to propel India to a six-run narrow win at the Oval.

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