Kudos to Fawad Alam but whom to blame?

Last evening Fawad Alam played one of the best knocks of his short ODI career and nearly pulled off another improbable win for Pakistan.

Under trying conditions Fawad Alam managed to make a chase of the target despite the established big guns having returned to the pavilion. He was ably supported by Wahab Riaz who played a gem of an innings in a short but extremely sweet stay.

Fawad Alam was struggling to time the ball early on and you could see that he was not a happy man. But on the departure of Abdul Razzaq he took charge and despite the earlier troubles manfully took the attack to the South African bowlers. Once the batting powerplay was taken in the 43^rd over, Fawad Alam hit a couple of consecutive boundaries and courageously went about making the most of the fielders coming into the circle.

Fawad Alam, small and slim, doesn’t appear to be a big hitter of the ball but he ably nudged and chipped the ball around to keep up with a scoring rate of over 9 an over. Had Wahab Riaz not stepped in it might have been too much of an ask for Fawad Alam, however, he was game for the challenge. That’s what impressed me most about him. I’m a fan of his from now on, no matter what anyone else might have to say.

Wahab Riaz’s cameo was extremely timely but, unfortunately, the decision to tell him to calm down may have caused his downfall. I believe it might have been better to just let him continue to tear apart the South Africans.

At the end I felt like strangling Saeed Ajmal. Let me just say first off that as a bowler I have great respect for him despite that disastrous performance in the T20 World Cup Semi-Final against Australia where Michael Hussey took him to the cleaners. However, in this match he really let Fawad Alam (and the Pakistan team) down in his childish attempts to play the hero. I could see Fawad Alam advise him to stay focused on the singles but he was still going for the big wild hoicks – without any success.

Do any of you remember another wicketkeeper named Zulqarnain from the 1986 Australasia Cup final in Sharjah? He was the one who got bowled while playing a cross batted heave when all that was needed was for him to take a single and give the strike to Javed Miandad. Miandad that day, with Tauseef Ahmad’s help and despite Zulqarnain’s failed heroics, managed to win the game for Pakistan by hitting the last ball for a huge six and earned legendary status just for that feat alone – he was otherwise a legend too, the first real finisher in the ODI game. But I digress. Zulqarnain never played for Pakistan again as far as I can remember – that’s the influence of Imran Khan for you. If you couldn’t be a team man then you couldn’t be in the team.

If Saeed Ajmal, who is primarily a bowler, let the team down by not tapping the ball and looking for singles then Imran Farhat, the opening batsman, badly let the team down with his selfish and tortoise-like 47 runs for which he wasted 86 balls. I felt a bit of glee at his dismissal. He should be axed. He can’t bat and doesn’t field too well either. Had he been able to fill in a part time bowler’s role I might have tolerated his inconsistent and selfish batting but what does he bring to the team?

If I had my way I’d play Kamran Akmal purely as an opening batsman in the ODIs and T20 games. The pressure to perform well in two areas would be taken off Kamaran Akmal’s shoulders and he would be able to focus simply on his batting. Plus being a keeper he would make a better fielder than Imran Farhat.

Fawad Alam and Wahab Riaz created so much pressure on the South Africans that they literally forgot how to bowl and field. The line and length was once again inappropriate (to say the least), simple catches were dropped and overthrows conceded. Panic had set in and just some sensible batting from Saeed Ajmal would’ve given Fawad Alam the opportunity to cash in on this breakdown in the well-oiled machine that is South Africa.

In contrast to Abdul Razzaq’s innings in the second ODI, Fawad Alam, who is not one to score too many runs from boundaries alone, was not in a position to decline singles and make up for it with sixes and fours. It also shows that Saeed Ajmal who has been run out on three consecutive occasions on this trip, i.e., twice in the ODIs and once in the second T20 game, can’t be relied upon to give the strike back to the scoring partner.

Abdul Razzaq didn’t trust him to give the strike back in the second ODI and thus Saeed Ajmal’s wicket was sacrificed – very calculating of Abdul Razzaq but thank God for that. And maybe that’s why Pakistan won that game otherwise Saeed Ajmal would’ve managed to ruin that game for Pakistan too.

If I have come off giving the impression that some of our team lost us the match then please let me correct that impression. Just as Abdul Razzaq won the last ODI single handedly with his century, so too did Hashi Amla for his team in this match.

The reason I haven’t yet covered Hashim Amla’s excellent knock in my post is that since it was he who was the difference between the two sides, therefore, he deserved space all to himself at the end. South Africa managed to score 228 simply because of his 119 runs which were scored off only 126 balls – in an innings where only one other batsman was able to score more than 20 runs. He was all that stood between Pakistan bowling South Africa out for maybe as little as 150. Pakistan bowled extremely well – for me Shoaib Akhtar was simply outstanding. But Hashim Amla batted even better. I can’t praise his knock enough.

Having watched South Africa since their readmission to international cricket I have yet to see any South African batsman who doesn’t look blocky and machine-like while batting. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen Barry Richards bat or Graeme Pollock take the crease so I concede that pre-apartheid era batsmen may have been different. From what I have seen since 1991 they seem to have none of the grace and elegance that someone like Ricky Ponting or Mark Waugh or most batsmen from the sub-continent possess. They are the “technically correct” yet “unpleasing to the eye” specimens of batting consistency. Their game is based on brute strength and graft in various quantities.

However, the exception, in my humble opinion, to the above statement is Hashim Amla. He has grace and elegance. He seems to be perfectly balanced while executing his strokes. To top it all off he doesn’t appear to be scoring half as quickly as he actually does. It is at times a surprise that he has scored a fifty without you even having noticed him get there. Why would that be? Because he does it with “effortless ease”.

Compared to Hashim Amla, Imran Farhat is “ease-less effort” and no results. Enough said.