Shoaib Malik's resurgence, and hot chasing streaks

Pakistan's batting line-up for the one-day internationals against India has come in for plenty of flak: Imran Khan has been the most vocal of the critics, questioning the policy of sending in lesser batsmen at the start and keeping the three big guns - Inzamam, Yousuf and Younis - back for the later overs. The tactic is a debatable one, but one batsman who has deserved his spot at the top is Shoaib Malik. Before his failure in the fourth game at Multan, he had scores of 90, 95 and 108 in his three innings.

Since Bob Woolmer took over, the change in Shoaib Akhtar has been publicised and written about the most, but the manner in which the other Shoaib has flowered has been equally impressive. The table below compares Malik the batsman in his first 68 matches to his last 43, all of them under Woolmer. The contrast is stark.

Not only has Malik been the batting star for Pakistan - only Inzamam (1434 runs at 46.26) has averaged more for the side in the last 20 months - he is also among the most prolific batsmen in world cricket in ODIs during this period. The table below lists the cream of the crop, and Malik sits proud at fourth spot, ahead of the likes of Rahul David, Marvan Atapattu and Ricky Ponting.

And no prize for guessing who the best No.3 batsman has been during this period. Malik's runs at that position have come an incredible rate of 47 per innings. Combine that with a scoring rate of 83 runs per 100 balls - a touch higher than Ponting's 82 - and it's a combination which is tough to beat. His ability to switch gears and bat according to the needs of the team means that, despite Pakistan's debacle against India, he is likely to retain that spot for a fair period of time.

Mahela's touch returns
Meanwhile, over in Australia, the Sri Lankans gave the home team a mighty scare before finally succumbing in the finals of the VB Series which, for a change, went the full distance. Their batsmen had a huge role to play in their resurgence, with Kumar Sangakkara, Sanath Jayasuriya and Marvan Atapattu all playing key hands, but the one batsman for whom the series marked a welcome return to form was Mahela Jayawardene.

Though he has played more than 200 one-day internationals and has been part of the national set-up for more than eight years, Jayawardene hasn't yet lived up to the mantle of Aravinda de Silva's successor. He averages just 31 in one-day internationals, and only manages a fifty-plus score every five innings - not the kind of the stats a team would expect from its leading man. For a while now, Jayawardene has been struggling to shake off the tag of a soft batsman - wonderful to watch when conditions are conducive to batting, but not quite cutting it when the going gets tough. That feeling is further re-emphasised by his overseas stats: before the VB Series, Jaywardene averaged 23 abroad, while his corresponding stats at home were touching 40.

Against two tough teams in Australia, though, Jayawardene showed just what he was capable of, scoring six half-centuries in 11 innings and aggregating 425, next only to Sangakkara's 469. More than anything else, Jayawardene's problem has been his tendency to blow hot one moment and blow cold the next. The table below shows his streaks of inconsistency: since the 2003 World Cup: each good stretch has been immediately followed by a horrendous run.

The thrill of the chase
With 12 successive wins under their belt when batting second, the Indians are closing in on the world record for the longest such streak: the West Indians had, in the mid-1980s, won 14 straight games chasing a target, starting from the Benson & Hedges final in Australia to a one-day international in Sialkot, Pakistan, a couple of seasons later. Quite incredibly, they had another stretch of 12 unbeaten run-chases just before, with the two streaks separated by just one defeat - against Australia at Sydney. Which means, over a 33-month period, the West Indians had lost once in an astonishing 27 run-chases. It's a sad commentary of the extent to which their game has fallen that they're currently running up a streak in the opposite direction: they have lost nine straight ODIs batting second over the last year.

Apart from West Indies, there are two other sides who have up a streak of more than 12: England won 13 consecutive times on the chase in 2003-04, while the South Africans equalled England's 13-match stretch earlier this season. Australia had a 12-match winning run too, which was broken in the just-concluded VB Series when they failed to get past Sri Lanka's 309 at Sydney.