Twenty20 games come and Twenty20 games go. There have been 757 internationals played around the world in the past 12 months, from Austria to Zimbabwe, and you’ll find that plenty of the men and women who played in them cannot recall too many of the details of most.
The 758th, though, the first game England have played in Pakistan in 16 years and nine months, was something else. England won it by six wickets, thanks in large part to Alex Hales who made 53 on his comeback after three years out of the team.
It was not the match, though, so much as the moment, the game was the result of years of diplomacy, months of preparation and came at the end of weeks of anticipation.
The Pakistan Cricket Board had spent $5 million on the security for this series, employed more than 5,000 soldiers to guard the two teams. There was a helicopter escort (they had to remove the spidercam from the stadium in case the chopper needed to land on the pitch in an emergency), a Swat unit on the stadium roof, and dozens of three-man sniper teams on the surrounding apartment blocks.
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They had gone to extraordinary lengths to make this feel something like an ordinary game of cricket, with the inevitable result that it ended up anything but.
As if all this was not enough, the match also served as a money-raiser for the Flood Relief Fund, with the receipts being given to help the 33 million people who have been affected by the monsoons in the south and southwest of the country.
Pakistan wore specially designed shirts for the occasion, with the players’ names partially submerged under water, and every six hit totted up another $1,000 donation from the sponsors. And there was also a minute’s silence to mark the death of Queen Elizabeth. After all that, the sport stories, Hales’s return to the team, Luke Wood’s debut, felt like incidental details.
With all that, the match ended up a little flat, as if it had been crushed by the weight of its own significance. Pakistan were put in and for a while it felt as though their openers, Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan, were going to mark the occasion with something special. They put on 85 in a stand that lasted most of the first half of the innings, before Adil Rashid bowled Azam with a googly. Rizwan pressed on and was particularly severe on David Willey, whose wayward second over went for 17.
But the innings faltered when Pakistan lost three wickets in 11 balls, Haider Ali caught in the deep, Rizwan stumped for 68, and Shan Masood caught off a reverse-sweep. So 104 for one off 12 overs became 125 for four and it needed three late sixes from Ifitkhar Ahmed to revive the innings.
Wood, the quickest and best of England’s three left-arm seamers, finished with three cheap wickets, after having Iftikhar and Naseem Shah caught in the deep in the final over. The total of 158 never felt like being enough.
It might have been closer if Masood had held on to a catch in the deep off Usman Qadir when Hales was on 28, especially given that he dismissed Ben Duckett lbw later in the same over.
By the time Hales was out England needed 17 to win off 21 balls. Harry Brook, who looked by far the most fluent of England’s batters as he made 42 off 25 balls, finished everything off in partnership with Moeen Ali.
By then, the crowd had already begun to drift away into the night. They had provided the abiding image of the night, a large home-made banner that said simply ’Thank you England’. – Guardian
