Follow UsIf you go through the scorecard of the Pakistan vs New Zealand contest, it will tell you that Babar Azam scored a valiant 64 for the hosts. It will tell you that Babar was the only Pakistan top-order batter to cross the 50-run mark in a 321 chase and it will also tell you that he hit the joint second-most boundaries among Pakistan batters on the day.
These are all facts.
There’s another fact from the contest that might be rather difficult to digest for staunch Babar Azam fans, which is that their ‘king’ was the reason for Pakistan’s utterly hideous showing in the chase in the curtain-raiser on February 19 (Wednesday).
After a bright start with the ball, the hosts slightly lost the plot and ended up conceding 320. Perhaps 20 or 30 too many, but by no means a target that was unattainable. All the hosts needed was a sizzling start up front and they would have been right in the contest.
With Saud Shakeel opening instead of Fakhar Zaman - the usual aggressor who was forced to bat down the order because of the time he spent off the field - the onus was on Babar, the senior partner, to get the chase up and running for the Men in Green.
Instead the chase was as good as done by the end of the 10th over: Pakistan had scored an eye-watering 22, the lowest by any side in 12 years in the Champions Trophy and their third-lowest ever powerplay tally in the competition. And at the forefront of this intentless showing up-front was Babar, who faced 27 balls in the powerplay and amassed 12 runs.
By profile, Babar is not a ‘powerplay basher’ and that’s a fact. Yet that can be no excuse for batting at a strike rate of 44.4 against the brand new ball with the field up, chasing 321 no less. Particularly when a batter of a similar profile - Will Young - scored 32 off 34 balls at a strike rate of 94.1 earlier in the day, batting in arguably slower conditions.
The required run rate which was 6.42 when the chase began blew up to 7.47 just 10 overs into the chase. And so Pakistan, who were already playing catch-up at the start of the chase, were nowhere in the picture by this point.
It is not uncommon for batters, particularly the conventional accumulators, to start slow and pick up pace as the innings progresses. Usually, slow starts can be ‘fixed’ if you’re a batter who knows how to pace your innings, particularly in a big chase.
Yet Babar’s innings NEVER took off.
If you were to split his 90-ball knock into two blocks, it would look something like this: 31 off the first 45 balls, and then 33 off the next 45 balls.
Astonishingly, there was not a single block in his entire innings in which the right-hander had a strike rate over 90.00 - this despite the side chasing 321.
As it turned out, Babar got to his fifty off 81 balls - the second joint-slowest for a Pakistan batter in the Champions Trophy - and then holed out just nine balls later.
The game was ‘officially’ done at this point but, in truth, it was done and dusted long back, when Babar and Pakistan decided to show no intent up-front.
On the night, Babar’s knock had a domino effect as well. It resulted in as many as three other batters ‘throwing’ their wicket away in an attempt to up the ante. For all we know, Agha Salman could very well have replicated his heroics from last week had Babar supported him the way Rizwan did against South Africa; the right-hander certainly was in the zone and hitting the ball really sweet.
After a very encouraging 15 or so overs, Pakistan gradually lost the plot in Karachi. This was not the ‘welcome’ they were hoping for, playing an ICC tournament game at home for the first time in 29 years. Ironically, it was the side’s best player who ended up letting the team down on the grandest of stages.