If you are in Pakistan and need something to get you going before the third day of the test started at 3am local time, you may have tuned in to the English Premier League match late at night. Sit back, watch Wolves take on Tottenham Hotspur for a couple of hours, switch to cricket.
What he would end up seeing was a gruesome and boring performance, dominated by the belief that avoiding mistakes was the central purpose of playing sports. To hell with the show, the result in the end is the only thing that matters. With that philosophy etched in the mind of Tottenham Hotspur manager José Mourinho, his team scored an early goal and sat so far back that he might as well have been lying down. They didn’t have a shot on goal for the final 75 minutes of the game, and later on, the Wolves, who had been building up pressure, finally broke through to a 1-1 draw. Social media blazed with fury from Tottenham fans. It turns out that if you’re going to play like this, you better get a result.
But if you had somehow stayed up and assumed you’d seen your fair share of sports wear, boy, Pakistan had a gift in store. They had tiptoed into the day at 30 of 20 overs, however I may have excused them because they might have been trying to see the day off on Sunday. But under a bright sun and blue sky at the beginning of the third day, Abid Ali and Mohammad Abbas began to see days three, four and five.
If there is another way to interpret Pakistan’s strategy on Monday, it will be necessary for someone from Pakistan to spell it out in detail without drafting. Some may argue that New Zealand began similarly cautiously, but the comparison is uneven enough to be false. For one thing, Kane Williamson’s side was sharp enough to jump immediately the moment a Pakistani bowler missed his target; Naseem Shah’s first three overs, delivered after a masterfully disciplined spell from Shaheen Afridi and Abbas, went to 21 runs when Williamson and Ross Taylor realized they had found a way out to ease the pressure. He put the onus on Pakistan’s relatively inexperienced bowling attack to maintain what were unsustainably high levels of precision, patience and discipline. When those standards invariably began to decline in the third session, the score began to rise.
Of course, Pakistan doesn’t have a hitter in its XI to match the quality of Williamson or Taylor, but if anything, that was a bigger reason why the way Pakistan approached its innings was doomed. Trent Boult, Tim Southee, Neil Wagner and Kyle Jamieson operating in tandem is arguably the deadliest bowling attack in home conditions. The first three of those each they have more land than the entire Pakistani pace contingent currently in New Zealand. In short, hitters tend not to survive against them for long.
From that singular point of view, Pakistan did not do it as disastrously as the party situation seems to have condemned it. New Zealand couldn’t get through batters in quick succession, the grounds didn’t fall into groups. Abid survived more than 100 balls, and the shortest stay in the fold was Haris Sohail’s – 22 balls. Even Abbas stayed for 55 balls. All the hitters were set, they all made starts.
These, however, are world-class bowlers, an adjective that cannot be used to describe most of the batsmen they were playing for. With Pakistan happy to survive regardless of a scoreboard that just wasn’t working, New Zealand was just as happy to hold onto their lines and wait for the rally to fail.
Jamieson conceded four runs in the first two sessions in the eleven overs he threw. Still picked up two windows; simply closing the store does not guarantee that it will keep this New Zealand attack out. His spell was emblematic of a New Zealand side at cruise control, while Pakistan might have been moving in first gear in a bad neighborhood. Eventually, you end up getting mugged.
And so, when the wickets came, each batter had spent time in the middle without making much of an impression on the scoreboard. Pakistan went up one hundred in 66; this is the slowest a team has reached that milestone in New Zealand since ESPNcricinfo’s ball-for-ball data is record-breaking. It is the seventh slowest by any side anywhere; the slowest half-dozen came on second-inning efforts, presumably when teams were looking to end ties.
It might not have been such a damaging day if the optics weren’t so uncomfortable. Pakistan’s head coach, Misbah-ul-Haq, is as famous for positive cricket as comic book fans are for lifting weights. And in response to a team as decidedly progressive as New Zealand, his team – and this team has been his for a while now – retreated into the comfort zone of self-preservation. No batter wanted to make a mistake, no one liked being the scapegoat. Ironically, with no one among the players bearing the blame, the focus of attention inevitably shifts upward: to Misbah and hitting coach Younis Khan.
This approach to cricket is hardly acceptable, as Tottenham fans will tell you. If a team achieves victories but away from home, Pakistan hasn’t won a Test Match since Misbah took over, and based on the evidence from today’s performance with the bat, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of ideas on how to do it. turn it around. This will be the 10th consecutive road test without a win; the last time Pakistan suffered a drier race on the road was in the 1980s.
When Fawad Alam, who had scored nine runs in 41 deliveries on the fold, lost his temper and threw one down the side of the leg that he legitimately should have left alone, Faheem Ashraf advanced to the middle. Pakistan had only achieved four limits in the entire day so far, and Ashraf felt there was little point in staying there if he wasn’t going to advance. With his eighth ball, he rocked back and hit Wagner in front of the square for four. Soon after, he hit Jamieson, who had made nine of 17 overs, eight runs on two balls.
The New Zealander quickly realized he would have to turn things around and gave Mohammad Rizwan one that was short and wide. By now, the Pakistani captain had joined the act and cut it by four. Two balls later, Jamieson’s frustrations took hold of him, and he picked up an Ashraf drive and threw it at the batter. The cruise control suddenly no longer worked. Pakistan doubled their score of over 60 in 20 overs, and Rizwan and Ashraf pulled out half a century.
It might be tempting to let the sugar rush from that seventh-field association overwhelm Pakistani supporters into believing that their plan for the day has some kind of merit. That, however, will be the talk of sleep deprivation. Pakistan could lose this match for the way they approached it, but lose it a little less comprehensively because Ashraf and Rizwan recognized that old-fashioned and conservative strategy for the cheating it was, and summarily dismissed it with the contempt it deserved.
Danyal Rasool is a deputy editor at ESPNcricinfo. @ Danny61000
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