Slowly does it for Pakistan
On deeper inspection, the more unsettling aspect of watching Pakistan over the past year - like the feeling, post-advertising, that what you've got is not what you were sold but will have to do - has not been their generally attritional, even dour
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
On deeper inspection, the more unsettling aspect of watching Pakistan over the past year - like the feeling, post-advertising, that what you've got is not what you were sold but will have to do - has not been their generally attritional, even dour approach. It has been that they have spun their way through it, writes Osman Samiuddin in the National.
Only twice have spinners bowled more balls in a year than the last, once in 2000 and once in 1987, a year that belonged to the modest duo of Iqbal Qasim, Tauseef Ahmed and the gloriously immodest Abdul Qadir. Partly circumstances have necessitated this, the loss of two opening bowlers and matches on surfaces where spin is more durable. But it is not as if there is a dearth of pace men suddenly; with Umar Gul, Junaid Khan, Wahab Riaz, Aizaz Cheema, and others at the door, there can't be. Yet that they have felt secondary to proceedings is mostly because the trio of Mohammad Hafeez, Abdur Rehman and Saeed Ajmal has been so outstanding.
The mystery about Saeed Ajmal's day in Dubai was not his teesra but how England were caused such embarrassment on a surface as harmless as an empty pincushion, writes Vic Marks in the Guardian.
No, England were undermined, not by the teesra, but by themselves and it was not so much a failure of technique, but of the mind. One of the problems when facing slow bowling is that there is time to think. So the brain comes into play as much as any instinctive hand/eye co-ordination. And England batted brainlessly, making poor choices all along the way. Ajmal, bowling no rubbish, just sat back and waited for another batsman's error. In Test cricket on a true surface it is usually necessary to wait a bit longer.
Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan and Graeme Swann all became the leading Test wicket-taker in a calendar year by spinning the ball a lot. Saeed Ajmal achieved the same last year by hardly spinning the ball at all, writes Simon Hughes in the Telegraph.
Ajmal has some parallels with Warne. He is able to turn the ball both ways and talks mischievously of ‘new’ deliveries, but in fact he primarily owes his success, like the great leg-spinner, to a high degree of accuracy and subtle variations of angle and degrees of spin.
Also in the Telegraph, Steve James says: "Ajmal’s action has been heavily scrutinised before, reported even. Indeed when it was cleared in 2009, the ICC report said: "whenever Ajmal bowls in a match in the future, his action will be under the scrutiny of the match officials". But, of course, there is now a 15-degree toleration in operation. I could not tell you whether Ajmal’s arm bends more than that in certain circumstances. It needs to be monitored, but for now it should not detract from a stellar effort."
In the Independent, James Lawton says: "Ajmal, who did not bowl a Test delivery until he was 31, not only achieved career-best figures of 7 for 55 with beautifully delivered off-spin leavened by the fabled doosra he inherited from his compatriot Saqlain Mushtaq on a wicket that offered such notable run-hoarders as Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen the equivalent of an empty supermarket trolley and a free pass through check-out. What he also did, with a smile that on such occasions is nearly as wide as the Punjab, is suggest we might indeed be in the middle of one of the most astonishing developments anywhere in world sport. This, of course, is the rebirth of a great cricket nation."
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo