Re: India/Pakistan series - Daily Diary
Lahori Munda's 2nd test day 1 review:
The second test between India and Pakistan finally got under way with both teams making two changes. India decided to play with three specialist bowlers as they replaced Ajit Agarkar and Ganguly with Zaheer Khan and giving RP Singh his test cap. Pakistan replaced Sami and Rana with Razzaq and Mohammad Asif.
I personally thing India made the right choice, on these batting pitches they really didn’t need a 6th specialist batsman specially when they have two good all rounders in Pathan and Dhoni after their specialist batsmen. Pakistan on the other I think went on a little defensive replacing Naved with Razzaq. While Razzaq’s inclusion does provide us with a longish tail but he is not the same bowler he once used to be when he first burst on the scene. At that time he was a bowling all rounders, over the years though he has more or less developed into a fairly dependable lower middle order batsman who could be used as an extra bowler. He just doesn’t have the same nip he once had as a bowler. I am hoping he proves me wrong here in Faisalabad and bowl aggressively.
Although India went with 5 specialist bowler the most disappointing thing for me so far in this series has been the way Irfan Pathan bowled compared to the other two left arm seamers India was playing. Both Zaheer and RP Singh bowled well and bowled a lot more potentially wicket taking deliveries compared to Pathan. RP Singh opened the bowling for India along with Pathan and was swinging the ball both ways. Irfan Pathan on the other could only generate out swing for the right handers, which is the natural away movement the left arm bowlers get.
I am convinced now that Shoaib Malik is not cut out for opening at the test level. His 50 in the last game was tentative, he has minimum feet movement, he doest get to the pitch of the ball and likes to play away from his body, he takes his eyes off the ball, he rarely comes on front foot and likes to stay either in his crease or go on the back foot. On these pitches if he can’t assert himself that he wouldn’t be able to do it any where else in the world either. He is a natural stroke maker and he is pretty good at it as evident from the runs he scored at the one down position in the ODI’s last year but at the test level he has failed to convince his usefulness. He is hard worker, a very good fielder and good bowling option but his batting leaves a lot to be desired.
All the Pakistani batsmen got stars but failed to concert them into big scores. Malik and Butt got 19 and 37 respectively and then the inform Younis and Yousaf made confident half centuries before being out to excellent fielding by the Indian fieldsmen. Inzi and Afridi were still there at the end with Afridi showing maturity not normally expected from him as he made 85 not out with only 3 sixes. Normally you would expect Afridi to hit out a lot more in a score of 85 but he made sure yesterday that he won’t gift his wicket away like he use to it in the older day. With this approach he could soon become a throne for opposing teams and captains.
The pitch still looked good for batting and India must have been pleased with their effort when at one stages they had Pakistan in a bit of a worry at 65-2 and then again at 216-4 but Afridi and Inzamam took the momentum away from the Indians with a solid partnership and guided Pakistan to a commanding position as they closed the day at 379-4. Indians will look to get an early breakthrough tomorrow, if not they can give up hopes of stopping Pakistan to score less then 500. Pakistan still has Kamran Akmal and Razzaq to come and would be eying a big lead once again. I don’t know if this pitch has enough juice to produce a result though, it is a little better then Lahore as it is a little more rough so the ball would reverse and also help the spinners as the game progresses but if Pakistan takes a big lead I don’t know if either Shoaib or Kaneria would be able to making dents in the Indian line up before they also pile up a truck load of runs. I think today’s play will give us a pretty good ideas if a result is possible on this pitch.