Waqar to miss Zimbabwe series for his wife’s surgery

Monitoring Desk

KARACHI: Waqar Younis, Pakistan’s bowling coach, has been released from the squad to be with his wife, who will be undergoing a surgery soon, and will miss the series in Zimbabwe as a result.

He is presently in Harare and will leave for home in Sydney on Tuesday. He is expected to join the team for their next assignment, a white-ball series in England in July; the team is scheduled to leave Pakistan on June 23.

The surgery is due early next month, but the mandatory quarantine on reaching Australia means Younis will only be able to be with his wife at the time of the surgery.

The PCB hasn’t named a temporary replacement for Pakistan’s series of three T20Is and two Tests, all in Harare – the first T20I is on April 21, while the last Test starts May 7. Younis hasn’t been with his family in Sydney for ten months, because of Pakistan’s busy home-and-away schedule. When there was a gap, in September last year, he had tried to return home.

But after landing in Australia, he had to serve a quarantine in a hotel and on the eighth day of his quarantine, his father died in Lahore. So he flew back to Pakistan instead to attend the funeral.

Later, after Pakistan’s Boxing Day Test in Mount Maunganui, he had called his family to Lahore, but the Covid-19 situation put paid to those plans too.

Younis, 49, took over as Pakistan’s bowling coach in September 2019, and has since worked with Misbah-ul-Haq, the head coach.

This is his fifth stint in the Pakistan support staffers’ team, having served twice as the head coach – 2010 to 2011 and 2014 to 2016 – and as the bowling coach in 2006-07, and the bowling and fielding coach briefly in 2009-10.