Umar Akmal should learn from Kamran, says McCullum

SHARJAH: Lahore Qalandars’ captain Brendon McCullum on Friday said that he thinks Umar Akmal should learn from his elder brother Kamran if he wants to progress and achieve success in his faltering career.

Umar was dropped from the Lahore side after scoring just 57 runs in the five games he played before he was sidelined to an extent where he doesn’t even come to the stadium.

Lahore lost seven of their ten games and for the third year and ended on the last spot in Pakistan Super League points table.

A disappointed McCullum admitted Umar had issues to solve.

“One thing you will take from me is total honesty and transparency,” said McCullum after his team’s last game which ended in Peshawar Zalmi’s seven wicket win in Sharjah.

“Umar is an incredible talent but he has his issues which is 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,” said the former New Zealand great.

“He got a great blueprint of what to do today from his brother (Kamran) and I am sure he sat back and thought he could be in a situation like this in future. But he has to make sure that he is performing to get himself those opportunities,” added McCullum.

When asked about his team’s performance, the Qalandars’ skipper admitted that his team “promised more but delivered less”.

“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 couple of injuries, effected some of the quality of players we had but took too long to find our feet,” said McCullum.

McCullum, who had a distinguished career with New Zealand , said he was disappointed and frustrated.

He, however, maintained that there was one thing which delighted him and it was the way his young players performed in last couple of matches.

“Last 10 days have been real positive I think if we look at Agha Salman, Sohail Akhtar, Gulraiz, Shaheen Shah; those guys performed really well probably in last 10-12 days, we were under a lot pressure.

“For these guys to stand up and perform like that and welcome themselves on the international stage with their performance was very positive. It was disappointing but its not all gloom and doom there are positives to take out from there,” said McCullum.

‘An incredible guy’

McCullum praised the owners of Lahore team, especially Rana Fawad.

“Rana Fawad is an incredible guy, his whole family is unbelievable. Losses hurt immensely a lot of us, disappointing that we couldn’t win trophy for Rana and Qalandars all over the world.”

McCullum also praised Zalmi batsman Kamran Akmal for his match-winning century against Qalandars earlier in the day.

“On his day Kamran is one the most explosive players in the world. What he showed today was just an another example of that. The wicket got 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 amount of pressure.

“Thought 170 was actually quite a pretty good score but when someone like Kamran comes up and plays like that. You should give credit when the credit is due as well, he played an outstanding innings and won the game,” concluded McCullum.