There's a certain sadness about Babar Azam's mortality

As first tasks go, telling Babar Azam that he was about to be dropped must have been some introduction to selection for Azhar Ali. Welcome to the committee. Before you settle in, here’s the mess you’ve inherited. Mind cleaning it up, pronto?Thankfully Azhar is used to this kind of stuff given his introduction to international cricket was the soap operatic mess of the 2010 tour of England, and that at one down, it was pretty much his entire JD. He’s a good, empathetic man, who probably would have wanted the responsibility of telling Babar he was going to be dropped. It can’t have been an easy call, and made no lighter by the almost ironic twist that it was under Babar’s captaincy that Azhar’s Test career ended, sooner, perhaps, than Azhar would’ve liked.These days, of course, teams tiptoe around the idea that anyone is being dropped. “Rested” as the PCB said diplomatically in their press release. A later communication said that Babar had been “spared from the team”, which, given…