Waqar ‘regrets’ issues he had with Wasim

DUBAI: Former Pakistan captain Waqar Younis has expressed regret at the strained relationship he shared with Wasim Akram during their playing days.

“I am really good friends with Wasim bhai, he has always been an elder brother,” Waqar said. “He has always supported and helped me on the field, off the field. Yeah, we had issues. He didn’t only have issues with me but we had issues in the team those days, which yes, if you ask me the truth, yes I do regret at times because you know it did not really help Pakistan cricket.

“But then again if you look at it, we had issues off the field but when we walked on to the field it was different ball game altogether. We wanted to compete [with] each other, we wanted to take more wickets than the other one and I think in a way, it did help. But yeah, if you ask me that particular episode, yes, we all regret it because it shouldn’t have happened. It was ugly those days but those days we were younger and we didn’t know much, now [we are] probably wiser and we want to improve things. Yeah, you can say that it was a regret.”

Waqar felt the standard of first-class level in Pakistan had diminished with too many teams being involved, and advocated “serious competition” to produce quality cricketers. “I thought the system was a little bit better than what we have now. We had lesser teams, we had more quality in cricket and also we had — we still got - talent,” he said.

“I’m not saying that we don’t have talent but I think this talent has been expanded and it’s been lost a little bit because we got too many teams playing first-class cricket.

“In those days, we had only like eight first-class teams playing and competing against each other. It was very difficult to play first-class cricket those days.”