Aaqib-ball sparks Pakistan’s latest revolution

Months after they’d hit the reset button, Pakistan were ready to burn it all down again. Aleem Dar, freshly announced as a member on Pakistan’s latest selection panel, glowered at the Multan surface. It had played host to a game where England racked up the fourth-highest total in Test history before dispensing swiftly with Pakistan. The curators believed it would have started taking spin sometime on day four. Pakistan’s specialist spinner Abrar Ahmed was already ill in hospital by then, with the promised turn nowhere to be found.

He glanced across at the surface two strips across. It would host the second Test. Under the blazing Multan sun, which hadn’t let up all game, the surface had a veneer that made it look like a sheet of glass; Dar could have combed his beard in the reflection. He looked back at the used pitch, dry as a tinder box waiting for a spark. The seed of an idea was beginning to form in his mind.

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In April, Pakistan had appointed Jason Gillespie as head coach to much fanfare, with chairman Mohsin Naqvi organising a press conference at the Gaddafi Stadium to personally announce the appointment. Weeks later, Australian Tony Hemming was roped in as the chief curator, understood to have been tasked with improving the quality of the surfaces over a long-term period.

But it wasn’t either of them that Dar called, when the idea to reuse the surface from the first Test struck. Aaqib Javed was brought up to speed, and was immediately on board, while the rest of the selection panel, comprising Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq and analyst Hassan Cheema assented. Neither captain Shan Masood nor Gillespie – who, at that time, were still officially listed as members of the selection panel on the PCB’s website – were spoken to; they would soon have that power taken from them anyway.

Giant industrial fans were brought in over the weekend to dry the surface out in an effort to induce spin as early as possible. The only problem? Pakistan’s only spinner was still in hospital with suspected dengue fever, and so the selection panel soon put their sweeping powers to good use.

Zahid Mahmood, released from the squad before the first Test, was called back. Sajid Khan was summoned from Peshawar where he was presumably sat twirling his moustache – given the full splendour of its glory once it, and Sajid, arrived in Multan. Noman Ali, seemingly lost to the sands of time, also got the call.

But the selectors weren’t done yet. Shaheen Afridi and Naseem Shah were deemed surplus to requirements, but the bombshell lay at the other end of the order. The out-of-form Babar Azam was dropped, a call no Pakistan selector had made thus far, and one Gillespie opposed. Veteran of the domestic circuit Kamran Ghulam was called up. As Sajid said after the series, these were “the kinds of pitch I have played on in first-class cricket”. A Quaid-e-Azam Trophy squad for a QeA-style pitch, it was reasoned, wasn’t a bad idea.

Privately, some of the selectors wondered if three spinners was overkill, but Aaqib was adamant; this was the way forward. Aaqib has become the public face of this selectorial coup in an astonishingly short span of time, seen as the man who effectively runs Pakistan cricket right now. To reflect that elevated status, he resigned from his role as director and head coach at Lahore Qalandars, a position he had held for eight years. On the second day in Pindi, Mohammad Rizwan, ever the astute judge of where the balance of power lies in Pakistan cricket, chirped into the stump mic as one spun sharply into Harry Brook, “This is Aaqib-ball now, we are members of Aaqib-ball.”

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Ben Stokes always calls tails, and that surface in Multan did Pakistan one more favour; it made sure the coin that landed on it had heads facing upwards. Ghulam, who had seen surfaces like these in the QeA for the best part of a decade, understood how to navigate them on day one, his hundred getting Pakistan the runs they needed.

Masood has made clear Pakistan’s problems were never about the runs. The overhaul had happened because Pakistan required a way of picking up 20 wickets, but by the time England sped to 211 on day two, just two had fallen. In the last home series Sajid played, he averaged just under 120 runs per wicket; figures of 1 for 70 in 13 here seemed appropriate explanation for why he’d played one Test in the following three years.

Being in the wilderness comes naturally to Sajid. He says he has tended to the last-in, first-out through his career stretching back to his junior days. If he failed to deliver when Pakistan had ripped up their long-term plan and publicly declawed their coaches to create bespoke conditions for him, there might just be no way back.

He found an area of rough on what was by now a day-seven pitch, and flighted it wider into the degraded dirt. Joe Root didn’t appreciate the changed length and went for the sweep anyway. It is a shot that batters have put away gradually over the past two Tests, and this was the first moment its perils became apparent. Root dragged on, Sajid and Noman ripped through the middle order, and the series turned on a dime.

“Pakistan have performed a weird interpretive dance, insisting it’s a team game in a series that has been all about individuals. Masood and Gillespie, who had their wings clipped. Aaqib, who has become cricket director, selector and coach in all but name. Sajid and Noman, of course, but also Shakeel and Salman”

Before the pair had even finished cleaning England up in the second innings, Aaqib and Dar were speeding along the M-2, making a beeline for Rawalpindi. Until last week, making a spinning track in Pindi was considered impossible; you might as well be planting palm trees in the Arctic Circle.

It’s not quite wedding season in Islamabad yet, so the PCB was able to pick up a few of those giant heaters, positioning them close to the pitch five days out from the toss. Giant industrial fans and windbreakers ringfenced the surface, with garden rakes diligently working around the footmarks. People did assume the pitchforks would be out by this stage of the series, but this probably isn’t what they meant. The following day, Dar and Aaqib were among a sizeable group of people working around the pitch; if there were signs asking people not to step on it, they certainly weren’t visible from the media centre.

Pakistan had barely used Zahid and Aamer Jamal in Multan, but confidence in the Sajid-Noman duo was so high Pakistan named both in the XI anyway – effectively playing with nine men. The coin landed the other way this time, something Masood had apparently told the group he wanted to happen because winning that way would prove a point. Pakistan opened with spin for the first time in Test history, but even when Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett struck up a 56-run partnership, Masood stuck with Sajid and Noman; they would bowl unbroken for 90 overs across two cities, three innings and eight days.

Pakistan have performed a weird interpretive dance, insisting it’s a team game in a series that has been all about individuals. The individuals, like Masood and Gillespie, who had their wings clipped, and those, like Aaqib, who has become cricket director, selector and coach in all but name. Sajid and Noman, of course, but also Saud Shakeel and Salman Ali Agha, who can counter these spinning conditions with the patience that comes with familiarity.

Rizwan, perhaps the best keeper in the international game, barely missed a beat in these trying conditions. Jamie Smith’s wicketkeeping credentials were fully put to the test, and missed chances – crucially a drop off Salman’s bat early in his second innings in Multan – began to mount. Individually brilliant players with specific skills in specific conditions, the rest of the team sacrificed to maximise those advantages.

The rest of the batters, as Masood pointed out, faced the same problems as England’s did. England’s top four comfortably outscored Pakistan’s over the last two Tests, 118 more runs between them during this time. But contributions through the middle order were scarce, and there was a consistent inability to shoot Pakistan’s lower order out cheaply; four of Pakistan’s seven largest partnerships this series came for the bottom four. Domestic cricket in Pakistan is a scrap, and this very domestic of Pakistani sides was doing just that.

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This has been a series played in terrific spirits. England have barely peeped about the spinning surfaces, while Sajid’s boisterous send-offs have been treated as harmless pantomime villainy. No one ever quite mentioned it again, but Pakistan hadn’t forgotten what Duckett had said during the second Test with Pakistan in a position of advantage.

“We know that they can crumble and so the pressure is over to them,” Duckett told broadcaster Sky Sports. “We’re 1-0 up in the series, and won the last series 3-0.”

He was right, of course. Pakistan had lost each of their last six Tests by falling apart in their second innings, often surrendering a position of relative advantage. In the dying light of the second day in Pindi, though, the tables were turned, and England had to come out in the third innings negotiating a tricky deficit.

Pakistan may have produced an overnight formula to come back in the series, but it was far too late for England’s batters to find one that countered Sajid and Noman. They had bowled all but 12 overs since England’s second innings in the second Multan Test, and the rust had been cast off. Before light intervened, Duckett, Crawley and Ollie Pope had their series brought to a close.

Pakistan knew better than most how easy it can be to fall apart in the third innings, having made that mistake each of the last five Tests before the turnaround. Now, they were making sure England understood too as they melted away in the face of spin’s ceaseless onslaught. Stokes, for some reason, shouldered arms to an orthodox left-arm spinner from Noman in front of the stumps. Smith tried to take Sajid on as he had in the first innings, never getting to the pitch as he was cleaned up. Root nicked off to Noman, while Rehan Ahmed fell over trying to lap Sajid. An easy stumping gave Rizwan’s series the finish it merited as England fell for 112, their lowest second-innings score since Brendon McCullum and Bazball.

This, indeed, as Rizwan senses, is Aaqib-ball. Meet Pakistan’s newest revolution, but keep that matchbox by you.