‘This guy needs to be benched’: Waqar Younis urges Pakistan management to drop star player, says ‘need to worry about…’

Saim Ayub‘s poor batting form continued on Thursday as he was once again dismissed for a duck against Bangladesh in Pakistan’s 2025 Asia Cup Super Four fixture. It was his fourth duck in the ongoing tournament, across five innings. He has only scored runs against India in the Super Four stage, where he registered 21 runs off 17 balls.

But the all-rounder has been in good bowling form and has taken six wickets ahead of the Bangladesh fixture. Despite that, Pakistan legend Waqar Younis feels that the 23-year-old needs to be dropped from the playing XI, so that he can rediscover his batting form.

‘I said this guy needs to be benched’: Waqar Younis

Speaking on SonyLiv, he said, “Look, I said it after the second duck, I said this guy needs to be benched. It’s not that he is not talented; he is very talented. I think he is the future of Pakistan cricket. But sometimes when things are not going right for you, you just keep going in the shell, keep going down and down, and that’s what is happening here with him. His body language was poor this afternoon when he walked onto the field.”

“You know, he is a youngster, you really need to look after them sometimes, by just not playing them sometimes. Pakistan kept on playing him, just purely because he can bowl. You don’t need to worry about his bowling; Pakistan needs to worry about his batting. If he is going to give us runs or not. At the moment, it’s not happening. He needs to dig deeper in his game to score a few runs”, he added.

On Thursday, he was dismissed while trying to slog Mahedi Hasan’s full delivery over the in-field. But it hit the inner half of his bat, and went flying straight to mid-on for a flat catch.