by Jarrod Kimber
Is Pakistan a very poor team?
Stuart Broad called Pakistan a very poor team and said England should win 3-0. Salman Butt said, “Pakistan isn’t playing good cricket at the moment, but what is this ‘poor team’ comment? You have a very good team, so what happens to you when you go to Australia? You lose 5-0 every time.”
England are a poor team when they lose 5-0, and most people say that.
But if there was a person who shouldn’t be mentioning Pakistan’s tours to England, it would be the only Test captain to receive a lengthy jail sentence after one.
Also, Broad is in the media, it is his job to rate cricket teams now.
But is he right? Is Pakistan a good team, a poor team, a very poor team, or complete and utter rubbish?
Josh Tongue, in the first innings, was bowling to Ali Usman, who was playing his third Test. In his career, the 33-year-old spinner has 12 runs, but was in at number eight as he bats well in first-class cricket. But Tongue treated him like a tailender and went straight for the yorker. Usman was out off the first ball he faced in England.
In England’s innings, Tongue himself came out to bat and he was facing Khurram Shahzad. Tongue is not a strong bat, and the idea would be similar: straight and full first ball.
Instead, Shahzad bowled a ball down the legside.
Now, in itself, it’s just two balls. But I think there is a bigger story here.
Tongue is a fast bowler who sprays it; you expect him to get things wrong a bit. Shahzad is a medium-fast bowler who is supposed to be line and length, and yet he almost never bowled the same ball twice.
Which is odd, because Pakistan has a samey attack that never bowls the same ball twice. Somehow they have a line up that is utterly boring and bereft of pace, an enforcer, and bounce. It’s Abbas, and then two really bad photocopies of him. But is still not accurate.
It is ok for your bowlers to be outdone by the opposition; England’s lot also had the better of the conditions. But if you come into a game with three right-arm medium-fast seamers and two of them bowl the ball everywhere, then something has gone horribly wrong.
When your seamer is so bad his teammates have to trick him into bowling one side of the wicket, like what happened yesterday with Shahzad and the 7-2 field, something is very wrong.
Mohammed Ali was just as random. In the 10th over of England’s innings, his first ball was good, and was edged to the rope. His next ball was squirted down legside, before a juicy full ball is slapped to cover and then a leg-stump half-volley. Emilio Gay is facing and is almost dizzy because of the pure chaos of the bowling. You can barely blame him when he’s out to a decent ball, finishing Ali’s first over in England.
In the 14th, there is a leg-stump half-volley, wide one, a beautiful delivery edged past third slip, short and wide, and the last ball of the over is fired down leg. Both of these overs go for over ten runs. There were chances in them, and even a wicket. But this is not Test bowling, and it is not what you expect when you pick bowlers of this speed.
Pakistan’s attack was three accurate seamers and a finger spinner. Why were they bowling so much utter shit?
Mohammad Abbas didn’t take wickets, but he went at 3.1 runs an over. Shahzad was 6.1 and Ali was 4.7 (but he also over a run-a-ball for ages).
Ali Usman’s game looks fine on paper. He got the ball to spin, and while he was a little too high with his economy, at 3.95, the five wickets he took make up for it. But there was also the period where he just kept bowling down the leg side to Dan Lawrence and Harry Brook.
This might seem harsh, but Pakistan’s best spinner was on the field for most of their innings and never bowled. That is because Sajid Khan was in as a sub fielder. Even after Usman’s haul, it’s hard to ignore that beautiful moustache out in the field.
This also brings us back to selection. As Steve Harmison said on talkSPORT, are we really to believe that in a nation the size of Pakistan this is the best XI players. Their team was not ideal, their squad isn’t either. And if someone gets injured, they will likely get that wrong too.
So while Usman took wickets, he played the same role as the other bowlers, which was to find ways to release the pressure on England.
Twice Pakistan got themselves in the game when they took the wickets of Gay and Ben Duckett, before Jordan Cox and Joe Root made a partnership. They broke that, and then allowed Brook and Lawrence to do the same.
That happened because of Salman Ali Agha’s drop of Brook. Shahzad took the edge; it went, at a very catchable height, to the right of second slip, and he barely got a finger on it. Shahzad could have been angry, but he had dropped Cox on a caught and bowled earlier. And my personal favourite, when Mohammed Rizwan was appealing for an LBW, and did not realise that the ball had come off the bat. So instead of taking an easy chance, the ball hit him as he pleaded for an LBW that was nowhere near out. And then they reviewed it.
Oh wait, that is not even the best one. That was when Usman delivered a full toss that somehow Lawrence ran past, and the ball went to slip. Pakistan were appealing for the LBW, while Lawrence was still out of his crease, so slip threw the ball towards the stumps, and instead of completing the run out or stumping, he hit Rizwan in the arse. Then they reviewed the LBW that was nowhere near out again.
Sigh.
In the first innings they did get the worst of the batting conditions, so you can allow for some low totals, plus they didn’t have Babar Azam’s finger to help them out. In the second, they were worse.
They kept finding catchers on the legside, which is a bizarre pattern. And the pitch had the odd ball lift at them. But really, they were just horrible. At no stage did they look like they were making any runs in conditions way easier than day one.
At the start of day three, Mohammad Ali escorted the ball to the boundary. He just kinda wandered behind it, like he was escorting a drunk from the premises while wanting to keep his distance.
It would be hard to watch Pakistan’s performance in this Test and think it was very poor. They were so much worse than that.
***
by Behram Qazi
Shan Masood is a lot of things.
A left handed top-order batter who has been playing international cricket for over a decade, albeit sporadically. A few months ago he was Pakistan’s captain, and he has also skippered Yorkshire for a couple of seasons.
Darren Gough was impressed with Shan’s prolific run-scoring for Derbyshire, and wanted him over at Headingley. The southpaw did not disappoint, averaging 53.9 runs per dismissal in 25 innings for the White Roses.
Gough did not hold back his words during a commentary stint, showering praise on Shan. He rated his batting, his work ethic, his general demeanor, and his character. There was a mention of how Shan underwent a lot of mental turmoil when he lost his sister a few years back, and then bounced back from it.
In an off-air conversation with me between commentary stints, Gough revealed the most fascinating anecdote of all. Shan, through the help of Gough’s wife, has been working on breathing techniques, in order to get into a good mental head space.
Shan has not always held on to his spot in the Test team, but runs are his currency, and he has made his comebacks on the back of heaps of them. He has been accused of being a product of nepotism, and even if connections helped Shan get his foot in the door, he used his own feet to walk through it. For all his failures, merit should never be questioned while talking about his 348th comeback.
You can understand why he needs those breathing exercises, because a vast majority of critics are breathing down his neck.
There is no doubting that he failed this week at Headingley, scoring 34 runs across two innings. Pakistan needed him to do more.
A batting average of 30-odd in Test cricket does not flatter Shan, that too across 48 Tests. As captain, he led Pakistan to four victories in 16 Tests, losing the other 12; an unwanted record that does not augur well for his legacy.
The one thing Shan does have though, that many others in Pakistan’s setup lack, is professionalism. Whether it’s on his batting or breathing, he always puts in the work.
Shan Masood is a lot of things, but above all else, he is a thorough professional.
***
by Rob Barron
Darren Gough is responsible for one of my favourite cricket quotes. ‘Why do they call you Rhino?’ he was asked. ‘Because I’m as strong as an ox’ came the reply.
I got to sit with him for an hour or so today and he was everything you’d expect- gregarious, engaging, funny. His insight on how he reads pitches was extraordinary - he’s able to have a look at a surface and tell you roughly what the score’s going to be at lunch. He’d be a good gambler, but people pay him to go on cruise holidays and talk to other people so he knows far more about playing the Game of Life than I do.
Obviously, we spoke about gambling and beer (he drinks Bud Light, but none of us are perfect). He gave me some great advice on how to courtside which I shan’t be taking up because I like both my betting accounts and my kneecaps.
Then I saw my hero. One of the cameramen in front of us on the gantry brings a hammock with him wherever he goes, and whenever there’s a break in the cricket he ties it up somewhere and goes to sleep in it. What a magnificent human being.
Gough told me he thought Pakistan would score 275. I think he meant across both innings.
Behind us, the inevitability of ineptitude was playing out.
Initially, Pakistan’s fielders, each with a hammock under one arm, set the tone for the day by trying as hard as they did yesterday. This shouldn’t be allowed under a proper coaching set-up. Mohammad Ali ran like Sonny Liston as he escorted a ball to the boundary that was barely quicker than he was.
Jofra whacked one into the Western Terrace. Jamie Smith got an innocuous-looking short ball from Khurram and, as he so often does, flapped it to a fielder on the leg side and trudged off disconsolately. It didn’t matter for the match - England would’ve won if they declared at tea yesterday - but it matters for Smith’s future. His ‘if it is broke, don’t fix it’ approach simply isn’t working, and if he’s not been found out already at this level, he’s dangerously close.
England led by 238. Pakistan laid down and had their belly rubbed again for 135 insipid, pathetic runs. Were it not for the rain this Test would’ve been done in two extremely unmemorable days. There was barely time for Rizwan to pretend to be injured 3 times before the presentation ceremony started.
