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“If it’s black, fight back. If it’s brown, lie
down,” the camping manual goes.
While this Pakistan cricket team may be near the
Antipodes of the Arctic, they are in equally uncharted territory when it comes
to travel guides for when they arrive. With generational talent, GOAT
all-rounders, and star-studded squads, Pakistan arrived here with talisman
captains and have won four Tests out of 38 matches, never two in a series.
It could be appropriate to embrace the global populist
movement and confront the reality that, for Pakistanis in particular, defeating
Australia in Australia is unlikely. You’d prefer a different captain, but you
also don’t want your best hitter to have to put up with the oppressive demands
that the captain’s band lays on a West Asian arm. If you want someone to take
against Australia’s most successful fast bowling trio in history, you want
someone with Imam-ul-Haq’s limitations to make sure he doesn’t get out while
playing a stupid shot off Nathan Lyon. You want Pakistan to bat for as long as
Australia and to score runs as soon as possible. You believe you’ve seen enough
to become indifferent, and yet you’ve set that pre-dawn alarm, cocooned in your
blanket as you fumble for the TV remote in the biting cold.
The illusion that these are two teams of roughly
comparable skill was dashed by the inhuman obscenity that is this Australian
bowling assault. For an hour and a half, Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins, and Josh
Hazlewood alternated to work Pakistan over at average speeds greater than any
of the country’s purportedly all-seam players had attained. Hazlewood and
Cummins may have been degrading a small portion of the pitch at good length
outside off since they consistently landed balls in the same spot. The two combined
to hit that location 170 times during the innings, giving up just 37 runs in
the process. In the same manner that he ensnared Sarfaraz Ahmed seven years
prior, Starc discovered traditional swing as late as the 76th over, sending
Sarfaraz Ahmed’s stumps cartwheeling.
Even Mitchell Marsh’s military medium found seam
movement in the Test match’s flattest conditions, deviating enough to take
Babar Azam’s outside edge and give Australia the morning’s most significant
breakthrough. Imam and Babar were closing in on a 50-run stand.
The suggestion that Pakistan should have struck a
higher score to match Australia’s first-inning total is misleading, as it is
implausible that such a method would have allowed them to survive for such a
long time. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Saud Shakeel and Shan Masood, the two
batters who committed to attacking the most, also lasted precisely 43 balls
each.
Many specialists are promoting numerous strategies,
some of which guarantee that Pakistan will defeat Australia in this nation.
However, as of right now, it is challenging to regard them as anything more
than quacks marketing pseudoscience because there is no precedent. Maybe in the
future, a cure will be discovered, but in the meanwhile, there are just various
techniques to treat the symptoms.
As it happens, the camping guide does discuss the
prospect of encountering a polar bear and offers advice on how to be ready for
it: “If it’s white, good night.”