It was the best of cricket; it was the worst of cricket.
Pakistan and West Indies played out a match that will be described as an exciting tie but was considered painfully boring for the first 90 overs of it. Misbah-ul-Haq’s men, who could very possibly have been 3-0 up in this series (or 3-0 down for that matter), will go into the fourth ODI down on morale but equal on the scoring table and perhaps also with Jason Holder’s name etched in their minds.
The events of the third ODI all called to mind two things.
The first was the matter of belief. The same questions that are asked as Chris Froome rides up Mont Ventoux, or when LeBron James rides the elevator to deny Tiago Splitter, were asked. That same question was asked after MS Dhoni did for India versus Sri Lanka as Holder did for the West Indies. That question, of course, is: how do we know this is all clean? It’s a matter of concern that the greatest attribute of sport – the emotional roller coaster that it provides – is seen as too good to be true. Personally, I believe that this was as clean as a whistle. Just looking at those final three overs, each of Saeed Ajmal, Junaid Khan, Wahab Riaz, Umar Akmal and Misbah would have needed to have been in on the plot for it to have worked. In fact, going through each and every mistake over the previous 97 overs and you can easily conclude that everyone, including the umpires, needed to be in on the action. And even with everyone involved it would have been nigh on impossible to deliver a tie in that fashion. Just look at the last ball: if Holder connects Windies win, if he misses then its Pakistan’s game, just because he edged it the match turned out the way it did. The fact is that Pakistan eased up as the 8th wicket went down, and as the Windies refused to self-destruct, Pakistan panicked in trying to get back into the zone.
The other, more relevant, aspect was that on the same day as Samir Chopra wrote his ode to Mushtaq Mohammad’s team that went to the West Indies, it was somehow appropriate that the last wicket pair did what they did. Many of us grew up on the stories of nail-biters between these two sides. It goes back to the 1975 World Cup, when a 64- run last wicket partnership between Deryck Murray and Andy Roberts denied Pakistan a victory by scoring the winning runs off Wasim Raja in the final over of the game. IF Pakistan had won that match, they would have just needed to score big and beat Sri Lanka in their last group match to go through to the semi-finals (which they did, beating SL by 192 runs), and West Indies and Australia would have been a playoff for the second berth. Instead the other two went through, met each other in the final, and started a decade long rivalry at the top of the cricket tree. Would Lloyd’s team have been as self-confident if they hadn’t been World Champions? Would Australia, after the World cup final loss, have been as ticked off as they were at the end of the year when they beat the Windies 5-1 in a home Test series; a series which led to Lloyd’s team adopting the ruthlessness of Australia and begin a 20-year domination? How would Pakistan’s history have been if they had won a World Cup even before Imran Khan became a regular in the team? On such fine threads as that Roberts-Murray partnership does the history of world cricket hang.
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