| Guts and glory |
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| Written by HW SquadStats | ||||||
| Tuesday, 04 December 2007 | ||||||
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That grit and gumption was the missing ingriedient in Pakistan's performances so far on their tour was the general call. They showed plenty of both in holding out for a comfortable draw in the second Test against India.
The Indian team took the first step towards following the pattern they regularly set in home games - batting first, putting up a massive total and batting the opposition out of the game. A general Indian trend of late is that when the Indian batting clicks, the entire batting line up clicks together and when it fails, they all fail together. 616 for 6 was a score that was constructed on account of big knocks running through the batting order (Jaffar 202, Ganguly 102, Laxman 112, Tendulkar 82, Dravid and Dhoni with 50 each). That it was constructed in two days left India with 9 sessions to take 20 Pakistani wickets. Ordinarily, one would have expected that to be enough. Through the tour Pakistan have sourly missed a partnership, which has been elusive despite a few individual efforts around. Here, they got three significant ones - Misbah-Ul-Haq (161*) and Akmal (119) with 207 runs, Misbah and Sami (38) with 91 in the first innings, and the veterans Younis Khan (107*) and Mohammad Yousuf (44*) with a partnership of 136 in the second innings, coming at a crucial time when Pakistan were 78 for 4 with over 3 hours to play out. There would be an unpleasant sense of familiarity that the Indian players would have felt as they watched Akmal stroke what turned out to be one of the three match saving centuries. It was in early 2006 that after having reduced Pakistan to 0 for 3 in the first three balls of the innings, India lost the game to an Akmal century. It is not often that both Kumble and Harbhajan fail to take 20 wickets in three days at home, and this only shows the significance of the knocks by the Pakistani batsmen. Pakistan have finally got a cohesive effort from the entire batting line up, and they will look to carry the good form into the next game. While the Indians will be dissapointed on having drawn a game that they really ought to have won, their batting still looks impregnable. It will be interesting to see if Karthik is replaced with Yuvraj, an experiment that would have almost been certain had India had the comfort of a 2-0 scoreline.
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