'Tired' Yasir not interested in records

It does seem a little ludicrous to think now that there was ever a chance Yasir Shah might not have made it for this series on the grounds that he wasn't fit enough. He has bowled one ball short of 140 overs across three innings so far and is likely to bowl plenty more if and when Sri Lanka bat again in Dubai. At times it has seemed he is the only bowler Pakistan have had, turning up at both ends, over after over. And he has been his usual perky self in the field. Not fit?

This is why it is so difficult to believe that Pakistan would really have struck to the hard line and not selected him. Forget the wickets - 14 and counting - who else on earth would have bowled all those overs, in this heat?

The burden has been part of a recent trend. Ten times in 30 innings since the start of the England tour in the summer of 2016 has he bowled 40 or more overs in an innings. In one innings he bowled 39 and in another 39.5. In Dubai he bowled 55.5 overs, the second time in three innings he has bowled more than 50.

The figures don't get easier to digest. Nobody has bowled more overs in Test cricket since his debut three years ago, and the average number of balls he is bowling per Test is, historically, comparable to anyone. If he bowls 18 more overs in this Test, he will leapfrog Saeed Ajmal as the most burdened Pakistani bowler per Test ever. And he will be seventh on the all-time list (of bowlers with at least 1000 overs bowled).

Not that he seemed the worse for it when he turned up at the end of an evening with an expensive six-wicket haul. "This is what we have to do, to bowl. I always try when I play for the team that I do well, that I bowl well.

"The wickets here are such - in Dubai, you don't get much support for spinners on the first day, so that's why I had to work a lot. So I just wanted to support the fast bowlers at one end. On the second day there was more break but the body was a little tired from so much bowling.

"I probably haven't bowled this much in a stretch before but I'm ok, the body is going."

Part of the problem is in that during this recent run, he has invariably been the only specialist spinner, so he has had to bowl a lot of the overs. That made sense on tours to England, New Zealand and even Australia. But Pakistan played three fast bowlers in the Caribbean in April this year in two of the three Tests and, more surprisingly perhaps, chose to persist with that policy during this series.

The decision to not play two specialist spinners in either Test - as has been the policy for much of the last seven years - has been criticised and it is likely to become more intense over the course of the next few days. Pakistan's think tank insist that playing three fast bowlers is simply them going with their strengths. And Misbah-ul-Haq, under whom two spinners was the UAE rule, often admitted that he went that way because those were the best resources he had.

It has been, argued that Mohammad Asghar, the promising, young left-arm spinner could have been given a debut in this series, but both Sarfraz Ahmed and Mickey Arthur have insisted that pace is the way forward.

It seems impossible they won't reconsider the next time they play a Test in the UAE, against Australia next year, not least because, as Mohammad Amir's injury during this Test showed, one spinner leaves the attack thin.

Yasir didn't directly question the absence of a partner, but he did say having one at the other end would make a difference to his own bowling. "Of course there is a difference. There is support, he bowls with you, that makes a partnership which spinners do well in. I had three fast bowlers playing with me, but you know the wickets here are such that they don't support fast bowlers.

"Asad Shafiq and Haris Sohail did bowl with me, they supported me. And the fast bowlers bowled well, in one place, but that kind of support wasn't there that you can get in England, or other places, the way wickets help fast bowlers there."

Yasir's most admirable quality is, however, to press on regardless - of surfaces, lack of partners, match situations. And so as he ended with a 13th five-fer in only his 28th Test, he created another record. He became the first spinner in history to take five-fers in five consecutive Tests, a run that began in the first Test of the series in the Caribbean.

Here's a measure of how tired he must have been at the end of this evening though. "Thank you for letting me know [about the record] - I had no idea."