OK I admit it was freakish…totally freakish…never saw anything like this before…and i can be philosophical and gracious about the final outcome recognizing what hussey achieved under such a huge pressure, but, as sameer chopra said on cricinfo, the fact remains that it still hurts like a knife in the guts!!!
And that leads to my next question….was it purely hussey’s brilliance or could Pakistan have done better….. Was our bowling quite as good as it could have been? All of us are so shell-shocked and stunned right now that we just want to give it to hussey but if you go back and watch those 3 dreadful overs again (if you have guts to do so!), you will realize that Pakistan bowling in those death overs wasn’t that great either…
Pakistanis knew or they should have known by then that hussey loves pulling on the onside yet they kept on feeding him with balls on the leg side including mohammaed aamir… and inability of our bowlers to execute Yorkers or in that zone was absolutely horrible….ajmal’s last over by any standards was really a poor one….either balls were pitched too short or they were sort of half volleys… and what about that ball that hussey hit to backward-point to make the scores level? I thought hussey should have been caught….
And I think we are missing the point by looking at last 3 overs only…we ought to look at it more holistically….remember, Australia scored 130 runs in last 9.5 overs…..that certainly suggests that we bowled pathetically throughout last 10 overs…afiridi was the biggest culprit who let the slaughtering process begin by releasing the pressure and was hit for 4 sixes in his 2 overs….almost every bowler bowled 2 to 3 bad balls in each over and that is a bigger problem that we have: lack of consistency, application and that final instinct to kill…more of a downward mental approach…and it also questions the team mix…i mean why did we need both hafeez and latif in the team?..sami could have been much better option…if you don’t want him to bowl, then don’t but if situation demands, he can be introduced…and he can bat as much as hafeez does (in 20/20 context)
Also this whole notion of reiterating that “when you come up against the sort of brilliance that Hussey showed, there’s probably no shame in losing” is mind boggling to me…we are not Afghanistan or Bangladesh…. We were defending champions…..If you are one of the top teams then that notion should be of little consolation to no consolation… …do we really expect aussies to keep repeating this notion that we lost it because our opponents outplayed us? It is all about mental attitude…. you lost it because somewhere down the road, you screwed up and your opponent took advantage of it…
In the end it was just another match but sometimes such closely fought matches instill deep psychological barriers into teams’ mental makeup….Some Indian and Pakistani players have publically admitted how miandad’s last ball six at Sharja shifted the mental pendulum into Pakistan’s favor for many more years to come…I think after losing this match from such position of strength, Pakistani players will become far more insecure about their abilities…and we may see its consequences in upcoming matches….
