PAK vs BAN | Abrar Ahmed or Mir Hamza confirmed to replace Shaheen Afridi in second Test

Shaheen has struggled for form ever since the recurrence of a knee injury in the 2022 World T20 final, especially in the longest form of the game. The left-arm quick has rarely breached the 140ks mark since his return, largely operating in the mid 130s, and the bowling average has parallely risen from a remarkable 24.86 pre-injury to the current mark of 27.08 in his 30-match career. 

Shaheen managed eight wickets at over 40 in the 2023/24 Australian summer before returning ordinary match figures of 2/96 in the recent Test against Bangladesh, the two scalps being those of the number eight and number nine batter. The 24-year-old had also become a father shortly before the series, which was cited as another convenient reason for the veteran's exclusion. 

Pakistan paid the price for not picking a specialist spinner in the opening Test on the pretext of a promising green deck at the start of play as the pitch played flat for the first three days before beginning to rag and offer variable bounce on the final two days. This makes the inclusion of leg-spinner Abrar Ahmed likely to replace Shaheen on the back of 38 scalps in his six appearances so far, the last of which came against Sri Lanka in 2023 before an injury kept him out for a significant period. However, adverse weather and curtailed training sessions in Rawalpindi has prompted the hosts to keep their options open by including left-arm medium pacer Mir Hamza in the 12-man squad for the encounter.

"We're looking at what our best combination is this game," Gillespie said. "We'll look at conditions and decide what the best makeup of our bowling attack looks like. We haven't been able to look at the surface much because of the weather, so we wanted to name 12. We want to be as informed as we possibly can before we select the side we think is best capable of taking 20 wickets."