He is not batting too differently to 2018, but how long can he trust his method and technique with the number of Tests without a century growing?

Sidharth Monga30-Aug-20214:30

Virat Kohli: ‘We will not be demoralised by this loss’

For a batter whose troubles centre on the outside edge of the bat, it is instructive that it is all underlined by the ball coming in. Virat Kohli has now nicked off in six successive innings in England, but the battle he is fighting is perhaps on the inside edge.Take the fourth morning of the Headingley Test. Resuming on 45 overnight, Kohli began the day beautifully, leaving alone all outswingers from James Anderson. He left 11 of the first 14 deliveries he faced on the fourth morning. Enough for there to be packages on the broadcast on how well he is leaving the same line that has been getting him out.Here is the difference: all these balls were bowled with the outswing release, and he picked them early and then let them go. The 15th ball Kohli faced was different. It was the wobble-seam ball from Anderson, which shaped in late, a repeat of the ball that got him out in the first innings. Kohli went to cover for the inward movement, and the ball seamed away to miss the edge this time. Only when the threat of the incoming delivery materialised did the indecisive period begin.Related

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Virat Kohli eager to prove doubters wrong

Kohli’s horrible 2014 really began when he left one alone from Liam Plunkett in the second innings at Lord’s only for it seam back up the slope and bowl him for a golden duck. This current extended lean patch began in New Zealand with Tim Southee and Colin de Grandhomme trapping him lbw beating the inside edge. These were all balls that looked like they would go away but changed direction upon pitching.About the 2014 rut, Kohli himself told Nasser Hussain in 2016-17 that his problem then was that he was expecting the incoming ball too much. He was worried about the stumps and kept pushing at balls he could have left alone. England’s job this summer was half done by New Zealand: Kyle Jamieson got Kohli lbw again in the World Test Championship final, and by the second innings he was ended up in the same shape as in 2014: pushing away at the ball and his right shoulder showing.That is a peculiar shot that Kohli plays. Those defensive pushes have an adverse risk-to-reward ratio. If you middle them, you get no runs. On the face of it, it is a lose-lose shot. But it is a precursor to the cover-drive, a shot Kohli has mastered. The defensive push gets him into positions to play the drive. Kohli’s reaction in 2014 was to not shelve the drive, but to start playing it better.There is a tendency to, post-facto, assign noble reasons to his great 2018 series in England. The popular memory of Edgbaston is a monk who eschewed the drive or the push away from the body. Now he has become the indulgent billionaire who can’t help but drive away. It is a narrative Kohli himself propagated by saying you have to leave your ego at home when you bat in England.In actual fact, Kohli flashed at the sixth ball he faced in 2018. It fell short of gully. He chased the next ball. The 13th ball he drove on the up, but the edge fell safe. The 15th he looked to work to leg and got a leading edge.By the time Kohli was dropped for the first time, off the 55th ball he faced, pushing away from the body, he had made 14 mistakes at an alarming rate of one every four balls. In this series, he has made 43 mistakes in 277 balls but that has been enough to get him out five times.Also the rate of leaves could be higher this time because they are not having to bowl straight at him, which they had to in 2018 once he got away with his early errors outside off. It is possible that nicking off the first ball of the series as opposed to, say, getting beaten by it as he might have had in 2018 has created just that bit of indiscernible, intangible doubt in Kohli when he is going for the push or the drive. He is himself a big proponent of absolute clarity at what you are doing in a game of fine margins.In the 2018 series Kohli left alone 211 balls of pace out of 818; this series he has not offered a shot 70 times out of 207. He is actually leaving alone much more frequently this series; make allowance for the rate to come down as innings go longer, and you will have him leaving at a similar rate as in 2018. He is defending more and driving less, but that too will change as innings get longer.In 2018, Kohli made 173 false responses to 818 deliveries of pace bowling, a control percentage of under 79, which is worse than the 2021 series where he has made 36 mistakes in 207 balls.Virat Kohli leaves the field after being dismissed by Ollie Robinson•Getty ImagesPlaying with more control and yet getting out five times to 36 mistakes as against seven dismissals in 173 false responses does point to a significant role of luck. And with Kohli, good luck and bad luck tend to arrive in droves: while he made 54 mistakes for 10 dismissals in the 2014 series, in the one Edgbaston innings alone in 2018, he survived 55 false responses. Neither of these events makes him any better or worse batter than he is.However, as it was observed by @flighted_leggie on Twitter, Kohli seems to have undone a technical change he made. Kohli had told Hussain that to better react to the ball that moved away from in front of him, he made sure his back foot stayed parallel to the crease when he first moved it, thus making sure his hip didn’t open up. His back foot is not, according to some footage seen from side-on this series, parallel to the crease, but in this string of dismissals, only once has his hip opened up: against Jamieson in Southampton. So it is possible he is happy with his alignment as opposed to being unaware that his back foot is not parallel.Kohli is just up against a highly skilful bowler surrounded by a highly accurate attack. It is not like he is going chasing every other outswinger, they are earning the mistakes he is making by creating the doubt that his inside edge is in play. His response to this bowling has been more or less similar to how he has played across a career of 7671 runs at an average of 51.14 in an incredibly tough era for batting.Batting technique can have an impact on how often you survive false responses. To a defensive batter, technique is something that saves you when you make a mistake. You misjudge the length, for example, but because you are playing under the head, the ball moves past your edge. To an attacking batter, technique is what gets you in positions to score runs. That is why they are able to score off balls some others dare not mess with.Cheteshwar Pujara gets out once every 13.71 mistakes, Kohli 11.3. Pujara is a defensive batter, Kohli aggressive, and these are choices they make. Pujara survives more mistakes, Kohli scores more by the time he makes those mistakes. Steven Smith is the rare genius who makes as many mistakes as Pujara to get out once but scores as quickly as Kohli. Both Kohli and Pujara are highly successful at what they do.If Kohli wants to make that change and wait for the bowlers to bowl at him, play a higher-percentage game in other words, he will have to give up some of the runs he scores through the covers. He was not willing to do that in 2014, he is unlikely to do so now. The only reason for doing that will be when the hand-eye coordination starts to become weaker, but that is not likely at the age of 32.How long then does Kohli keep faith in his methods and his technique despite the number of Tests without a century growing? Bat like results don’t matter while knowing that on that cold scoresheet, they are the only thing that do matter. If anything, this phase tells you how freakishly difficult what peak Kohli made look easy was.

What an extraordinary, abject spectacle this series is turning out to be

Andrew Miller18-Dec-2021At 5.10pm local time, Joe Root and Dawid Malan strode back out to the middle of the Adelaide Oval with a three-hour century stand in the bank, a Test match (theoretically) in the balance and an Ashes campaign to be rescued, right there and then.Within a further three hours, the Ashes had turned to dust, and James Anderson’s and Stuart Broad’s emotional reunion under the floodlights had instead become a rabbit-hunt in the headlights.Despite the delicious prospect of a quick kill and the enforcing of the follow-on almost on the stroke of sunset, Australia’s seamers instead put their search for wickets on hold to indulge in a spell of bunny-bashing. When you’ve claimed four prime wickets for 19 runs in some of the most pristine batting conditions of the series, a team is entitled to trade 16 tail-end runs (England’s joint-third-highest stand of the innings) for the chance to leave a lasting impression on their opponent’s battered carcass.A diet of bouncers, right into the ribs and on one occasion, Broad’s jaw, was then followed by the inevitable sight of David Warner and Marcus Harris sprinting off the pitch after England’s tenth-wicket tenderising had finally come to an end. Where’s the need to go again when you are so far ahead of the game?And as night follows day, not long after 9.30pm, Australia’s openers had posted their highest first-wicket Ashes partnership in four years and 15 innings, at which point England abandoned the zip-around-in-the-gloom policy that had dictated their selection for this match, and turned instead to their Test-match everyman, Root – for whom it is not enough simply to carry the entire team’s batting all year. All of a sudden he is considered the only spinner worth his salt in the entire country.Related

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By 9.45pm, however, Root had shamefully failed to emulate his previous pink-ball bowling figures of 5 for 8, and England had been reduced to bowling for run-outs, to set the seal on a day of rock-bottom ignominy.Is it possible that we are in the midst of witnessing England’s worst-ever Ashes challenge? With two days to come, two more sessions of Aussie run-harvesting, and two more trials by twilight up the sleeve for Mitchell Starc and Co., it’s eminently plausible. What an extraordinary, abject spectacle this series is turning out to be.Of course there’s mitigation, there always is. The build-up to this particular series has been indescribably tough – the lab-rat lifestyle of cricket in Covid times could hardly be less conducive to a cheery team environment. Four years ago, the squad was at least able to pop down to a local dive and indulge in a spot of beer-fuelled headbutting to loosen a few intra-squad tensions.But the cricket itself… even allowing for the rain that wrecked the series build-up, and six years of white-ball priorities that wrecked the County Championship schedule, and the glut of fast-bowling injuries that wrecked England’s best-laid plans, and a post-pandemic financial imperative that has sucked the joy from the act of playing sport for a living … there’s still no excuse for the spineless surrender that England served up in an afternoon session, a passage of play that could not have been more critical to the team’s ambitions in the series they claim to hold most dear.And it all began, dare one say it, with England’s golden child himself. Criticising Root for a lack of application in this year of all years is rather like accusing the Pope of fallibility (no, not Ollie Pope … we’ll come to him later too). And yet, as Root himself telegraphed as he threw back his head and bent his bat over his brain in self-admonishment after nibbling an edge from the lanky seam of Cameron Green, he knew all too well that he’d given it away once again. He had reached his seventh fifty in his last seven Tests in Australia, and his eighth in 11 all told, but it needed to be converted to that elusive hundred – instead that missing statistic looks set to condemn him to the tenth defeat of his career Down Under, and his sixth out of seven as captain.Joe Root looks on before walking out to the middle•Getty Images”It’s pretty frustrating and disappointing to get back within touching distance of them,” Malan, England’s top scorer with 80, said afterwards. “We can talk about the guys that failed, but ultimately one of Rooty or myself should have gone on and got a big hundred there. We’ve been found short as a batting unit, compared to the Australian unit, and that’s something we need to do better from this next innings onwards.”Most worryingly for England’s hopes of staging a fightback, however – at Melbourne, Sydney or Hobart, let alone in the next two days – the ball that derailed their innings wasn’t even the one that prised Root from the crease. Rather, it was the one that Green served up four balls earlier, a bona fide snorter that hit the seam and climbed past the edge, as a bowler of Green’s height is wont to achieve on occasions. His next ball, at the start of a new over, also climbed dramatically, and suddenly Root was playing a different game, rushing his hands to meet the anticipated point of impact rather than playing each on its own merits, under the eyes, down through the cordon, as he had done with such sangfroid all morning long.What happened next was a credit to Green’s ability to make things happen, of course, and further proof that Australia have found themselves a truly tantalising talent, but tall bowlers extracting bounce is hardly a mystery weapon in Australian conditions – that tactic, over and above outright speed, was the making (and the subsequent breaking) of England’s victorious tour in 2010-11, as well as their last most forgettable visit three years later.But Root needed to know that the moment would pass, that hanging tough through a torrid passage of play was a fair trade-off for the serenity that beckoned on the other side of Green’s spell – he’s spent long enough watching David Warner and Marnus Labuschagne live on their wits to know that. Instead Root jabbed with hard hands at a ball he had no reason to engage with, and as he dragged his year’s tally of 1606 runs back to the pavilion, his replacement at the crease was pure wide-eyed panic.Suddenly, there were demons everywhere. Malan had been intermittently skittish during his 138-run stand with Root, including a brace of inside-edged drives off the seamers and more than a few wild cuts against Nathan Lyon’s spin. But at least his captain’s controlled presence at the other end had emboldened him to go for his strokes, and make his own decisions about the risk-reward they entailed.Now, suddenly, everything was on his shoulders. With Ben Stokes devoutly runless for his first 24 deliveries, priming himself for his Headingley-lite finale, Malan too was crammed back into his shell. His second ball of this new partnership was a low edge to slip, and as Lyon began to hound his technique from round the wicket, his only two scoring shots for three overs were another snick past the slips and a madcap single to cover … which brought him back into the firing line of the returning Mitchell Starc…”Out here, you have to have the intent to score, to put the pressure back on the bowlers,” Malan reflected afterwards. “It’s also identifying certain periods of the game where the Aussies are going to attack you and trying to counter that. Looking back, I probably should have left that ball and hopefully could have still been batting but that’s a learning curve for myself.”But Malan didn’t leave that ball – a not-so-juicy half-tracker that was too tight for the cut shot that he had played so effectively one ball earlier. And nor did Pope (the fallible version) learn from a reprieve at short leg off Lyon, as he cantered down the track two balls later in a desperate bid to smother the spin before it engulfed him, and picked out the same fielder.It was his second extraction by Lyon in as many innings, and having been similarly tormented by R Ashwin last winter, Pope’s average against offspin has now plummeted to 15.57, compared to a serviceable 36.20 against the quicks. It’s a blindspot that England’s most exciting Test prospect seems no closer to resolving, as his career progression remains in stasis, almost two years on from his breakthrough hundred in Port ElizabethNathan Lyon claims the wicket of Ollie Pope•Getty ImagesChris Woakes at least showed proactivity until he too was spooked by the one that didn’t quite behave – another big turner from Lyon inducing a flat-footed poke two balls later – which is more than can be said for the haunted Jos Buttler, whose first-day drops meant that he began his innings in serious arrears – and at no stage did he ever look like clearing his debt.Another hard-handed jab sent Buttler on his way for a 15-ball duck, which is the fourth time he has batted so long for no runs – more than any other Test cricketer since 1991. Far from being liberated by his proven white-ball derring-do, Buttler seems paralysed by the expanse of Test cricket’s possibilities, like a stoned astrology student contemplating the limitless reach of the stars in the night sky.At least, on that note, it was another pretty sunset for England to contemplate as they sat on the balcony and watched their old stagers get duffed up. The optics of England’s actual cricket, however, are looking pretty hideous.

With their win in Lahore, Australia are free in the knowledge that they can stick to what they know if they get the basics right

Alex Malcolm25-Mar-2022The ghosts were there. The ghosts of Headingley, Sydney (twice), Brisbane, and Karachi. They were there sitting on the shoulders of the Australians as they tried to close out victory in Lahore.They were there when Australia dropped key catches in the fourth innings, again. When they fluffed a gifted run-out chance, again. When they burnt three reviews frivolously again, which forced them to second-guess the one when it would have yielded a key wicket.But lady luck finally shone on Pat Cummins, Nathan Lyon, and Australia, and they slayed their demons and scared off the ghosts to deliver a thoroughly deserved series victory.Related

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There’s no denying Australia were the better side across the three matches and there’s an argument that they should have won 2-0, having made all the running in both Karachi and Lahore. There is no doubt they were aided by the toss in both matches, but their batting delivered in the first innings in all three games, and they bowled superbly in the first innings in Karachi and Lahore to give themselves time to take 10 fourth innings wickets, with runs to play with on both occasions.Four dropped catches and three magnificent innings from Babar Azam, Mohammad Rizwan and Abdullah Shafique denied Pakistan in Karachi, with the hosts surviving the second-most overs in the fourth innings in history.Babar threatened to do it again in Lahore. Lyon had to get him out three times, but the last was the most satisfying for both him and Steven Smith. The latter had either dropped or missed no fewer than seven chances across the series, but Smith pouched the one that mattered most, a really sharp catch low to his left after Lyon had got the second new ball to skid on and catch Babar’s outside edge.Smith and Lyon roared as Lahore fell deathly silent. You could see the weight of the world lift from both men’s shoulders.Lyon has been carrying it for some time. Since Headingley 2019 no less. Australia’s inability to close out games since that famous day has fallen on his shoulders. But his overall form since Covid-19 stopped global cricket in March 2020 has been a curiosity. Over his previous 11 Tests prior to Lahore, he had averaged 39.80 and struck at 95.20 without a five-wicket haul.It wasn’t that he was bowling badly. But there was a certain sameness and rigidity to his pace, his lines, and his lengths at times across the period that had caused some consternation both inside the camp and out.The big knock was that he wasn’t creating fourth innings chances. But in all fairness, he had had very little luck in the supposed fourth innings failures that were thrown at his feet. He had Ben Stokes missed at slip and plumb lbw at Headingley. He had Rishabh Pant dropped twice by the wicketkeeper in Sydney 2021.Steven Smith held a sharp catch to remove the key figure of Babar Azam•AFP/Getty ImagesThose ghosts threatened to consume Lyon in Lahore. Babar should have been run out early in his innings. Travis Head made a poor throw to Lyon but his fumble, although not his fault, did bring back memories of Headingley.He had Babar caught brilliantly at slip by Smith off the glove and pad but it was given not out. Australia had torched two reviews on earlier lbw shouts where the inside edges could be seen and heard in Sydney, so Cummins was reluctant to burn their last, given they weren’t 100 per cent sure it brushed Babar’s glove. The ghosts of Stokes’ lbw haunted Lyon again.Babar then tried to launch Lyon over long-on in the last over prior to tea and miscued to deep midwicket. Head misjudged the flight and failed to get hands to a catch that should have been taken. The ghosts of Stokes again would have flashed through Lyon’s mind as he slumped to his haunches.But luck evened things out for Lyon and Australia today. He was perhaps fortunate to dismal Azhar Ali with a 50-50 DRS call going Australia’s way despite the original decision being not out.Lyon also bowled Hasan Ali via his helmet and the back of the bat as he attempted to sweep out of the rough. And fellow spinner Mitchell Swepson held a spectacular catch in the deep to hand Lyon his five-for.It was a rich reward for Lyon who has bowled better than the numbers have suggested at times in this series, and deserved more luck than he has got. He was rewarded for a different line to Imam-ul-Haq, attacking the left-hander with a rare venture from over the wicket to get him caught brilliantly at silly mid-off by Marnus Labuschagne.Changes in pace, dropping below 80kph at times, was also part of what undid Babar, with some of his slower deliveries ripping out of the footmarks and eventually, causing Babar to play for more turn than was there on the one he eventually nicked.That Swepson, Lyon’s understudy for so long was unable to take a wicket in this Test and was only entrusted with five overs on the final day proves Lyon is still invaluable to Australia’s attack despite his detractors.However, it is clear that Australia’s path to 20 wickets in Asia relies heavily on Cummins, Mitchell Starc and their bevy of reserve quicks than on Lyon or any spinner he’s paired with. Cummins, Starc and Cameron Green combined for 23 of Australia’s 41 wickets for the series while the spinners took just 15. Green took the key wicket of Abdullah Shafique while Cummins was monumental again as a strike-force blowing away Fawad Alam and Rizwan with two superb deliveries to expose the tail. Although Pakistan were equally guilty of DRS blunders, as Rizwan would have been reprieved if they had used the review they were reluctant to use, having burned two of their three already.Lyon’s role as a holder in Australia’s attack even when it is spinning big, and more liberal use of Labuschagne, while the quicks attack when the moment suits, may well be the method going forward in Asia for Australia.They have been freed from the ghosts of the past. They are free in the knowledge that they can stick to what they know if they get the basics right.

England newbie says blaming white-ball focus is a “cop-out” as he targets prolonged run in side

Andrew Miller06-Apr-2022After a winter spent at close quarters with a modern England great in Joe Root, Dan Lawrence says he’ll be mining into the methods of another of his illustrious team-mates at Essex, Alastair Cook, as he returns to Chelmsford determined to build on the marginal gains of a “frustrating” first full year in Test cricket.Amid the doom and gloom of England’s slump to the bottom of the World Test Championship standings, and with a solitary victory in 17 attempts since February 2021, the insistence from within the England camp that there are “positives” to take from last month’s 1-0 loss in the Caribbean has come in for heavy criticism – not least from Cook himself, who has denounced the rhetoric as “deluded”.And yet, Lawrence’s sparky displays – at least in the first two Tests in Antigua and Barbados – were as uplifting as anything that England have produced all winter. Twice in as many games, his selfless second-innings batting took the attack to West Indies to set up a pair of final-day declarations, and though he admits he’s still “kicking himself” for the manner in which he gave away a maiden Test hundred at Bridgetown, the initial signs are promising as he seeks to make Root’s former No. 4 berth his own.”I’m happy [to have got my opportunity],” Lawrence said during Essex’s pre-season media day at Chelmsford. “It’s been quite a long winter. Obviously I didn’t play in Australia which was disappointing so it was then nice to get few games in the Caribbean. I felt like it went alright. I’m a bit disappointed about the last game, but that’s life. I feel like we’re improving a lot as an England team and I’m just excited to get going with the Essex boys now.”After 11 stop-start appearances since January last year, Lawrence’s record epitomises the erratic current state of England’s Test cricket. Four excellent and contrasting half-centuries – including a match-winning effort on debut in Sri Lanka and 96 defiant runs on a spinning deck in Ahmedabad – have been countered by five ducks in 21 innings, including a fateful leave-alone to his final ball of the winter in Grenada.But the potential is undeniable, and Lawrence’s annoyance at his failure to fully cement his credentials cannot distract from the sense that he’s emerged from the Caribbean with a clearer understanding of the player he needs to be within this rebuilding team.Dan Lawrence will be back in Essex colours at Chelmsford on Thursday•Getty Images”It’s been frustrating, to be honest,” Lawrence said. “Of the scores where I got in, I would love to have gone a little bit bigger, because all the best players do that. You’re always going to get low scores in international cricket. It’s bloody tough out there, there’s some serious bowlers out there.”It’s about trying to work out how to survive those early bits, which I’ve got to improve on. And then, when I get in, really go big. I’ve got to keep it literally as simple as that, and just keep enjoying it. It’s obviously a massive honour and privilege to play for England. So it’s something I desperately want to continue doing.”Lawrence perhaps will not get a better learning experience, however, than the circumstances of his 91 in Bridgetown. On a blameless first-day pitch, and with his captain Root at the other end in a hefty third-wicket stand, he had the match situation, and the wise counsel alongside him, to truly make his start count. But then, in the closing moments of the day, he allowed his blood to pump too freely as he lashed a catch to cover moments after back-to-back boundaries, and instead it would be Root and the next man in, Ben Stokes, who would cash in with three figures.”It’s massively gutting,” Lawrence said. “I would have taken 91 at the start of the day but it’s a funny game – no matter how well you do, you always walk away a bit disappointed with batting. If I had that moment again, obviously I’d do things differently, but there’s always stuff to learn from it and if I get that chance again, then hopefully I can rein myself in a little bit more.”That’s how I generally play my cricket anyway – to try and get the game moving and try and put the opposition on the back foot as much as possible,” he added. “Then it’s just about having the ability to go through the gears and go back down a couple of times. And my reflection from that is I wish I’d slowed down a little bit and then got a really big hundred. That’s what all the best players do – when they get a chance to go big, they go really big. And that’s my main reflection from the tour.”Few players in English history have gone much bigger than Root and Cook – with five double-centuries each, only Wally Hammond (7) has reached 200 more times. And having seen at close quarters how “relentless” Root can be when he gets his chance, Lawrence says he’ll be looking for tips from Cook about mastering the mindset of red-ball batting.”He’s someone I’m going to use quite a lot at the start of the year,” Lawrence said. “Not necessarily from a technical point of view, but trying to pick his brain with mentally how he went about it. Because it’s tough work, Test cricket. It’s obviously brilliant and great fun, but it is a massive step up, and mentally it can be quite tough. So I’m going to try and use him as much as I possibly can, pick his brains, and take whatever I can from the best players.”Part of that mental prep involves shutting out external factors – of which there are plenty swirling around at present, as English cricket grapples with an extended run of defeats that hasn’t been countenanced since the tough days of the 1990s. Already, however, Lawrence seems to be learning to filter out the noise and just focus on the job at hand.”I don’t try and listen to too much of what people say off the pitch,” he said. “I think people do generally enjoy being a bit more negative about the England side than may be needed.”But I think for us now, it’s completely irrelevant what’s happened in the last 12 months. It’s obviously not been an ideal 12 months for us as an England side. That’s quite obvious to anyone. But we’ve got a real opportunity now to really make the most of our home conditions and try and get some good series wins under our belt.”And I really think that the way the team’s going, if we do keep going like this and we all keep improving as players, I really think we’ll start getting some wins on the board and when everyone’s around and when we’ve got our perfect England XI out, I think we’re going to be very hard to beat.”Much of the blame for the Test team’s recent woes has been laid on the ECB’s explicitly white-ball focus of recent seasons – first with their run-in to the 2019 World Cup, and more recently with the establishment of the Hundred, and the absence of Championship cricket in last year’s prime summer months.Joe Root shared a lengthy stand with Dan Lawrence in Barbados•Getty ImagesLawrence, however, isn’t having any of it. “I think that’s a big cop-out that a lot of journalists use,” he said. “They blame white-ball cricket for the failings of red-ball cricket, but India have got an amazing white-ball team and their Test-match team is still incredible.”There’s a lot of people there who are desperate to do well in red-ball cricket, and we play as much as we can, and we do as much as we can, to try and do well, and it’s something that, I’m sure with the quality around, that it will turn. It will turn for us. I think the whole white-ball thing is a bit of a cop-out.”On the impact of the pandemic, however, Lawrence is rather more equivocal. His county coach, Anthony McGrath, believes that the lack of youth-team fixtures in recent seasons has stunted the development of Essex’s rising crop of players, and while the opportunities for the new faces in England’s set-up haven’t been quite so limited, Lawrence admits that his first experience of an Ashes tour – ordinarily a career highlight for any player – was “not great”.”We were allowed out for dinner and stuff but we could only sit outside, and it just wasn’t as good as an Australia trip away can be,” he said. “The training was very limited. At the practice game [in Queensland], it rained the whole time as well. It was one of those where I just think it wasn’t quite meant to be. And Australia are obviously a very, very good side as well. And they’re hard to beat even if you have the best prep in the world.”Related

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It was doubly frustrating for Lawrence given that, in the spring of 2020, he had returned from Australia as the stand-out performer on that year’s Lions tour, and in ordinary circumstances, would surely have warranted an opportunity to prove himself again in those conditions – especially once the series had been lost with two Tests to come.”I was disappointed, yes,” he said. “I mean, I can’t do anything about it – when you don’t get picked, you don’t get picked. And that’s fine. It was just a bit of a driving thing for me to try and do well whenever I did get a chance. And thankfully I did get my chance in the West Indies.”It can get a bit tedious after a little while, especially when you feel like you haven’t got a big chance of playing. But it’s just about trying to keep on top of everything – do what you can and try and stay as fit as possible and hit a lot of balls and hopefully when you do get a chance try and take it.””It’s not been ideal but still, when you go and play for the country, it’s just as special even if it is a Covid game. The Caribbean was the first real taste of a little bit of freedom for a lot of us. The rules weren’t quite as strict. We could go out for dinner, we could go and meet friends and stuff as long as it was in a controlled environment. It was a good tour and felt like the first sort of tour normality for a while.”Next stop then, for Lawrence, a probable green seamer against Kent at Chelmsford, and an encounter with a man whose name has cropped up with increasing frequency throughout the winter – including in last month’s third-Test collapse in Grenada, where Kyle Mayers wobbled the ball on a good length to claim seven match-wrecking wickets, and showcased precisely the probing attributes that the evergreen Darren Stevens has made his trademark.”It will probably be quite similar,” Lawrence admitted. “We’ll just see what happens when we get out there on Thursday. I’m sure on the seventh of April, with loads of rain around, it will do a little bit but I’m just going to play it by ear and see how it goes, and take each day as it comes. To start off this season, I’ve just got Essex on my mind.”

Babar and Imam continue scoring buckets of runs, and Shaheen continues to take new-ball wickets. But what about the rest?

Danyal Rasool11-Jun-2022If you buy a ticket to a Rod Stewart or Elton John concert, it’s unlikely you’re desperate to listen to their latest album. If JK Rowling was booked for a chat at your local bookstore, the chances that those crammed in will pepper her with questions about are fairly remote. And if you ran into the Brazilian Ronaldo on a morning jog, you’d likelier want him to talk about his career than do a few keepy-uppies on the spot.And if, in 2022, you queue up in the heat – as the Multan crowd has gamely done a couple of times this week – for a Pakistan ODI performance, it’s not because of the tantalising hope that maybe, just maybe, this might be the day the middle order comes to life. Or to discover the answer to the question: who really is the best new-ball opening bowler to partner Shaheen Shah Afridi? The crowds have lined up to go in and see a Babar Azam masterclass, a long top-order partnership that breaks the opposition’s backs – likely alongside Imam-ul-Haq – and a few new-ball wickets for Shaheen, followed by that already iconic celebration.There’s no false advertising here. It’s what Pakistan sell, and it’s what Pakistan deliver in this format at the moment. The PCB might as well start offering refunds any time Babar misses out on a big score and almost never lose money. Imam’s numbers are only ever trending upwards, and that includes enhanced strike rates against both pace and spin. Shaheen’s first-spell prowess is a self-fulfilling prophecy by this point. And on the odd occasion, you might see something that counts as a bonus, like a Khushdil Shah cameo or a Mohammad Nawaz masterclass, as have happened in this series against West Indies. If you’re really fortunate you might happen to have a ticket on the two out of ten days when everything is in Fakhar Zaman’s strike zone.Let’s be real here, though; most of the stuff you see from Pakistan in ODI cricket besides those cast-iron guarantees is not a harbinger of a problem solved, a box ticked, a platform laid for future construction. It’s just an ode to the inherently boring truth that international cricketers will, from time to time, have a good game, and when it happens might sometimes be random. It is why Khushdil was able to hammer this West Indies attack out of the ground on a Wednesday night in Multan, but, in the face of similar bowling, incapable of doing the same on Friday evening. It’s perhaps also why Nawaz went for 61 in ten overs in the Wednesday-evening heat and took 4 for 19 under the twinkling stars on a muggy Friday night. It’s why, perhaps, on the Sunday, Fakhar might smash a scintillating century, or Shadab Khan get a quickfire lower-order 40 off 19 balls.But it’s impossible to say without guesswork which of those is more likely, and that, effectively is where Pakistan’s ODI cricket is at the moment. It is, of course, better for this series to be played than not, even if for the longest time it felt as if no one really wanted to play it if the ODI Super League hadn’t forced them to. But from the hosts’ perspective, anyway, it tells us almost nothing that wasn’t already known to even the most casual observers, just like the Australia series, and probably just like whatever series will follow this one. Pakistan are almost exactly where they were when they played their first game after the ODI World Cup in 2019, except the facets that were already strong are now exceptionally, world-beatingly so.The tempting arc to draw from here would be Nawaz becoming an integral part of Pakistan’s ODI planning and preparation, but if that were to happen, it would be a fairly dramatic departure from how involved he has been thus far. The allrounder has only featured in 18 of Pakistan’s 84 ODIs since making his debut, taken more than one wicket just six times, and scored more than 20 runs just three times. Khushdil, meanwhile, is only six matches into his ODI career, and while his heroics from the first ODI should shield him from too much premature criticism for now, it only takes a handful of indifferent performances for the knives to be sharpened again.!function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var t=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var a in e.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;r<t.length;r++){if(t[r].contentWindow===e.source)t[r].style.height=e.data["datawrapper-height"][a]+"px"}}}))}();