Yousuf Shortlisted for Cricketer of the year & Test player of the year award

ICC short listed the nominees for various awards to be handed out on Sep 10 in Johannesburg before the start of 20/20 world cup. Yousuf has been able to make it to the shortlists of Cricketer of the Year and Test Player of the Year awards. He is the only Pakistani left in the final race after Mohammad Asif was cut from the long list of Cricketer of the Year.

For ICC's major prize of Cricketer of the Year, Yousuf competes with Kevin Pietersen, Ricky Ponting and Shivnarine Chanderpaul. Mohammad Yousuf is competing with Kevin Pieterson and Muttiah Muralitharan for the Test player award. It will be important to see how ICC decides on this since on paper it looks like Yousuf is the sure winner with a record of 944 runs in 10 innings at 94.4, however Pieterson with 1255 runs at 54.4 and Murli with 43 wickets at 11.6 a piece are strong contenders.

Although Yousuf had a stellar year with the bat but considering ICC's bias against Pakistan and Yousuf's being out of favor with PCB it seems highly unlikely that he will be able to win any of these awards. If that happens it will be another great injustice to one of the most prolific batsmen of recent years who has a history of being tagged as under achiever despite his heroics. Yousuf's biggest problem has been that for most of his career he had to live under the shadow of other great names such as Javed Miandad and Inzamam-ul-Haq. Everytime he performed he was immediately compared to these two greats and he always came up short. Another of his undoing has been that he has never been a flashy player like a Shahid Afridi or Shoaib Akhtar. He had always been the quite accumulator who seemed to always have fun with his batting whenever he was out in the middle, always focused on his task never caring about what the spectators wanted him to do. For an odd reason his speed between the wickets has also been overshadowed by a few run outs, so much so that he was once labeled as second most likely batsman to be run out behind Inzamam. When put as a question, to this he once smilingly replied that he is likely to get run out because of his speed and enthusiasm to sneak runs where they weren't possible, unlike Inzamam. Anyway, it will be important to see if the cricket world continue to do injustice to this great batsman, failing to acknowledge his contribution to the game of cricket.