Mohammad Amir will replaced Roman Raees Pakistan vs India clash in today’s Champions Trophy final
BY.ASGHAR ALI MUBARAK
The Pakistani fast bowler Mohammad Amir will replaced Roman Raees while hard hitter Faheem Ashraf will in action in the place of Emad Wasim.A back spasm had ruled Pakistani fast bowler Mohammad Amir out of the semi-final against England on June 14, after he failed a fitness test shortly before the toss.Azhar Mahmood, Pakistan’s bowling coach, had said that Amir is available for selection, Pakistani fast bowler Mohammad Amir competed a training session. “Amir bowled in training session. Amir is fit,” Mahmood had said.Amir’s availability leaves Pakistan with a conundrum, albeit a happy one. Allrounder Faheem Ashraf was picked against Sri Lanka and took two wickets, and then Sri Lanka’s fielding fell apart just when Pakistan looked most likely to go out of the tournament. When Amir’s back injury surfaced in the semi, Rumman Raees bowled very well in his first ODI and they also got the advantage of playing on the same pitch twice in three daysDespite bowling well, he was wicketless in the first two league matches, against India and South Africa. Amir had success against Sri Lanka, taking 2 for 53 and scoring a valuable 28 not out in an eighth-wicket partnership that sealed a semi-final place for Pakistan.Amir has been a near-constant presence in the Pakistan XI since his return to international cricket at the start of 2016, playing 47 out of the side’s 57 international matches, across formats, in this period.
Bring on the battle of the middle So far in this tournament, India have hardly lost wickets in overs 11-40. Pakistan’s bowlers have done most of their damage in these overs. This period could be title-deciding on today Sundaysuper final.We all know that Pakistan can beat India . We know that’s like a thing. Sure, before the tournament, Sarfraz Ahmed talked up Pakistan’s record against India in the Champions Trophy, then his team proceeded to play as if cricket were a new sport to them and India won by over 120 runs without even playing their best. Yes, there was that Asia Cup miracle from Shahid Afridi a few years ago, but overall India have become this limited-overs machine while Pakistan are a scrapyard of new and used parts.
Coming into the Champions Trophy, since the last World Cup India had played 21 ODIs against teams that qualified for this tournament, of which they’d won only nine.
Once here, Pakistan were humiliated and then rebuilt to scrap their way through until they annihilated Slogland in the semi-final. India have just knocked the ball around a bit, had one blip when they couldn’t beat Sri Lanka, but since then have been warming up with what looked like practice matches for their final.
And of all the easy games they have had this tournament, the one against Pakistan was the easiest.
Wahab Riaz, who for some reason – perhaps the folks at the PCB didn’t have access to Statsguru or their own memory banks – started in the XI for this tournament. Against India he went to No. 2 on the all-time list for bowlers who have conceded over 80 runs in a match. As for claims that he is a strike bowler… if you take a wicket every 48 balls, as Wahab has since the last World Cup, you’re not a strike bowler; you’re just a bowler. Junaid Khan came in in his place.
Junaid has not played much recently, and when he has, he has not been great. His overall record is not particularly great either. But he does take a wicket every 35-odd balls, and has good county-cricket experience. He did bowl better than Wahab in a practice match, but he was still a risk. The risk paid off against Sri Lanka. He took 1 for 28 from his first five overs, which wasn’t that spectacular. But then, when he was back in the 31st over, Sri Lanka were 160 for 3, with captain Angelo Mathews nearing 40 and Niroshan Dickwella into the 70s.
When Ahmed Shehzad was dropped, it meant that Pakistan had to change their point fielder. A few different players have rotated through that position since, but the best one has been Shadab Khan. He is clearly the most athletically gifted Pakistan fielder since, wait, let me think… umm, no, well, maybe ever. He moves like fielders from good fielding teams move; he’s young, quick and hungry. He still fumbles sometimes, but half the battle is making the batsmen doubt that there is a single there and he certainly does that. Against England, it was the sort of pitch where you wanted to use soft hands and steal singles, and Pakistan made that tough. It wasn’t just Shadab; the whole team was switched on. And most importantly, Sarfraz wasn’t letting the game meander; since the South Africa game, he had regularly kept one extra fielder in the ring, or sometimes two extra fielders in. This is a Pakistan team building pressure not through magic balls and swagger but through hustle and strategy.
And then finally the biggest change came at the top of their innings. In the first game, they sent out Shehzad and Azhar Ali, two players who don’t make a lot of runs and take a long time to not make those runs. It was a horrible combination, made all the more terrible by the man they left out. Fakhar Zaman has been killing it in domestic List-A cricket for years, he averages 50, with a strike rate of 95. Fifty. Ninety-five. Almost everything has gone right for Pakistan since losing to India. Their spinners took wickets against South Africa and the rain then ended their chase but not before points were secured. Allrounder Faheem Ashraf was picked against Sri Lanka and took two wickets, and then Sri Lanka’s fielding fell apart just when Pakistan looked most likely to go out of the tournament. When Amir’s back injury surfaced in the semi, Rumman Raees bowled very well in his first ODI and they also got the advantage of playing on the same pitch twice in three days.
The only thing that has gone wrong for them is that Bangladesh lost to India.
India never seemed to leave fourth gear for most of the 2015 World Cup; they won all their group games, and when they batted first they made over 300 every time, including in their quarter-final win against Bangladesh. Their theory was pretty sound. They were one of the first teams that knew they could score over 300 pretty regularly. But, unlike the other teams that could do so, they seemed to decide that if they didn’t go after 370 or 350 or whatever they perceived to be their maximum in those conditions, it meant that they would more often than not get to 300 or 320 in those games. And then scoreboard pressure would win them more of those games than they lost. In the semi-final, it was Australia defending with a more potent bowling attack that caused them to come unstuck.
India have the batsmen to score over 400, but they don’t seem to have the game plan for that.
As the overall run rates of teams have risen, teams no longer fear targets of 300. The idea that 300 is par in ODI cricket is ludicrous – since the last World Cup the only team scoring that much per first innings is England. But teams do chase 300 more now than ever before, and India have been on the wrong end of that a few times. Of India’s last four losses when batting first, three of them have been when they have scored over 300, the other one was defending 295. In this same period, they have also lost two games when chasing over 300, both times making over 300 in the chase but still falling short of the target. So that is one way you could beat them: restrict them as best you can even as they play it a bit safe, and then have your batsmen put on a near faultless display of batting as Sri Lanka did in this tournament.
The problem for Pakistan is that this is not what Pakistan do. Since 2015 against the teams in this tournament they have only chased one score over 300, and they have won with only one first-innings score over 300. Totals of 300 are just not their thing. Heading into this final, Pakistan have two players of the 20 who have scored over 100 runs this tournament, India have two of the two who have scored over 300. It’s not that Pakistan’s batting has been spontaneously combusting, it’s just that they don’t make many big scores; they make medium totals, or they chase small or medium totals.
Pakistan are the best bowling side in the middle overs, India are the best batting side in the middle overs.
India have many strengths; you could easily look at their bowling, which is probably close to as strong as any attack over the years. Bumrah is top-quality from the beginning until the end. He, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Jadhav are all going at less than five runs an over. Only Bhuvneshwar has taken more than four wickets, but India’s bowlers have still accounted for 23 wickets so far this tournament, bowling teams out twice.
India’s next strength is their batting at the death. In this tournament they score at 11.93 runs per over, practically two runs a ball, and score a boundary every 3.3 balls from overs 41 onwards. Against Pakistan they made 72 off their final four overs. But the reason they score at this rate in the end overs is because of what happens from overs 11-40. That is the real key to how this team has won matches.
For India, you could club the opening overs with their boring middle phase. India don’t have a Brendon McCullum, or even a Luke Ronchi. They certainly don’t have a David Warner type. Over the last five years, no India batsman scores at more than a run a ball in the first ten overs, in fact, they don’t have a player who scores at more than 90 in that part of the game. They hardly have a player who scores quicker than Ian Bell. Ian Bell, who was largely let go because he scored too slowly. It seems the Indian openers’ main job over the last two years (and beyond – since 2012 they have the 11th highest run rate for the first ten overs) is to not lose wickets, and be somewhere between 45 to 50 runs.
What does that mean for this tournament? Well this plan has come off better than usual; they have lost one wicket from their first ten overs across the four games they have played. Then they bat in the middle overs, and, well, that has been pretty extraordinary.
They average 96 runs per wicket in the middle overs, while scoring at 5.90, hitting a boundary every nine balls. Let all that sink in. They score quicker, don’t lose many wickets, find it pretty easy to hit boundaries, and have set batsmen coming into the death. And by “don’t lose many wickets”, let’s be specific: they have lost seven across their four games. So if you add their one from the first ten overs to the 11-40 section, in 160 overs of cricket in this tournament they have lost eight wickets. That is how you become the team that has a highest score of 381 but a lowest of only 200, the second-lowest differential in ODI cricket since the 2015 World Cup – only Bangladesh have a lower differential, but their top score of 329 in this period is also by far the lowest among the eight teams in this tournament. They almost always make runs, because they hardly ever lose wickets.
Against Pakistan earlier in this tournament, they were 213 for 2 at the end of the 40th over in a rain-reduced 48-over innings. They ended on 319, having made those aforementioned 72 from their final four overs.
In that game, Hasan Ali was still human; he bowled well in the middle overs of that match, hit a good length, made the India batsmen respect him as his six overs for 21 runs in the first 40 suggest. But his final four overs went for 49 runs, largely because he didn’t take middle-over wickets. Since then he has been a middle-over maniac. And Pakistan have followed his lead; in the three games since India, they have taken 16 wickets in this period of the game at an average of 21 while only allowing 3.93 runs an over. Two of the three teams to play them have been bowled out, the other was eight down – these three included the No. 1-ranked side, the pre-tournament favourite, and the only team to beat India so far.
Pakistan have only three wickets in the first ten overs of their matches this tournament. The middle overs have been the period where Imad Wasim, Mohammad Hafeez, Shadab Khan, Mohammad Amir, Faheem Asfraf, Junaid Khan and the middle-over GOAT Hasan Ali have built dot-ball pressure and waited for one wicket, and then built that into two or three.
Last game, going against all the experts’ opinions and even their own record (which suggested they weren’t better bowling first) they chose to send England in. Their last three wins have come bowling first. So, if Pakistan win the toss in the final, the chances are India will be batting first, and by the 40th over of the match, we will most likely know the what the result will be. The battle of the middle overs is what will probably win it.
To win Pakistan will have to keep riding on the wave they’ve somehow found the last few games, pretend India aren’t India and then bowl them out or at least go very close. To win India just need to keep playing how they have been doing and handle the pressure of being red-hot favourites in a final.
Over the last few years, and even in this tournament, the two sides have been the shambolic scrapper and the calm scorer. We know what India will probably do. Even though we know how Pakistan have been winning, as always, we have no idea what they will do. Hopefully they do.As India and Pakistan clash in today’s Champions Trophy final, we take a look at some other finals.Arch-rivals facing off in world tournament finals is rare in cricket. India and Pakistan, the 2017 Champions Trophy finalists, have played each other in only two big finals – the 2007 World T20 and the World Championship of Cricket in 1985. India and Pakistan have a long-standing rivalry across sports Field hockey India vs Pakistan,The Olympics years – 1956, 1960, 1964
India and Pakistan played three successive Olympic gold medal matches over eight years. Pakistan, whose first Olympics appearance came immediately after independence in London in 1948, were the only team to run India close in Melbourne in 1956. Four years on, Naseer Bunda gave them gold in Rome, snapping India’s streak of six successive gold medals. India got their revenge in 1964, in the first Olympics held in Asia, beating Pakistan 1-0 in the final in Tokyo. They have never faced off in an Olympic final since.The World Cup final, 1975 in hockey was conceived by Pakistan’s sports administrator of repute, Air Marshal Nur Khan, and Pakistan remain the most successful team in the men’s game, with four titles, including the first one in Barcelona in 1971. Four years on, they seemed on course for their second title in Kuala Lumpur. The final against India was an absorbing match, with Surjit Singh and Ashok Kumar, son of the legendary Dhyan Chand leading India to a 2-1 win. The team led by Ajit Pal Singh remains the only Indian team to have won the World Cup.Arch-rivals in big finalsSo far in this tournament, India have hardly lost wickets in overs 11-40. Pakistan’s bowlers have done most of their damage in these overs. This period could be title-deciding on SundayHow is it that we have got here? It seems surreal. In the age of skirting around stereotypes and upending norms, here comes a contest almost as old as partition itself: Pakistani bowling v Indian batting, and still, though we have all tasted this masala and read some version of this script, it doesn’t feel even slightly hackneyed, not even a little stale.How could it be? Australia might be the winningest outfit in the game, but are there two prouder cricket nations than India and Pakistan? Close your eyes. Bring to mind the players of yore. Waqar Younis and his yorkers, with tails like comets, making matchsticks out of the stumps; Mohammad Azharuddin, his flicks like brushwork, the ball teleporting through the leg side, reappearing so far into the distance you only knew it had arrived when it thwacked the boundary board. Here is Sachin Tendulkar tapping his bat, so poised, so zen at the crease; there blows Shoaib Akhtar like a hot wind, limbs whipping through that elastic action. An India v Pakistan match is not so much a new chapter in a rivalry, as a clash of cricketing bloodlines.And an elemental force has each side been in this tournament. India, sleeker now than they have been in previous decades, have overpowered oppositions to get to this final. Not since Australia in the last decade, has an ODI team looked quite so clinical, quite so bristling with purpose. They have a formula about their game too: start steady with the bat, surge through the middle, and finish big. With the ball: strangle up front, make incisions through the middle, and let the opposition innings bleed out. They stand now, muscles rippling, only once – against Sri Lanka – having had to break a sweat.Pakistan, meanwhile, have been the same old manic vortex: awful sometimes, amazing at others, transitioning from one to the other between matches, or within the same over – who knows how the mood will strike? While India are a knowable, quantifiable outfit, Pakistan’s strength is their imperviousness to any kind of rational breaking down of their game. How can you plan against that?Still, it is Pakistan who will have to spring the surprise here. They are the team that has to make the charge on Minas Tirith. It is up to them to gird up their strike power for the raid on the Death Star.No one has quite lived out India’s dominance in the Champions Trophy, nor their appetite for the big events, like Shikhar Dhawan, whose 317 runs at an average of 79.25 (and a strike rate of 102), places him at the top of the run scorers’ list. Much like with his team, there is a brooding confidence in Dhawan’s game at the moment. He is resplendently unflustered by slow starts, backing himself to score quickly later on. So well-placed is India when he typically departs, that it’s not just that he has laid the foundation, he has helped complete most of the building. All that remains for the likes of MS Dhoni to do is stick a spire on the top, and run the flag up the pole.And who better embodies the campaign of what was the eighth-ranked team in the tournament than the man who was thought to be only the fourth-best quick in the squad. Hasan Ali has a hint of the old Pakistan sorcery about his bowling: the lachak in his approach, the theatrical celebration, the wisps of reverse swing. With ten victims at an average of 17.20, and a wonderful economy rate of 4.52, he has the potential to be the pebble that jams up India’s cogs, and brings the machinery tumbling down.R Ashwin was seen with a heavily-taped right knee on the eve of the match, and had appeared to pull a muscle. He required the physiotherapist’s attention and was then seen doing short run ups followed by stretches later. If he is ruled unfit, Umesh Yadav, who took 3 for 30 in the opening match against Pakistan, may slot back into the XI. Such is the quality in India’s squad, that they can lose a player of Ashwin’s stature and still not be too badly dented by it.
India (possible) 1 Rohit Sharma, 2 Shikhar Dhawan, 3 Virat Kohli (capt), 4 Yuvraj Singh, 5 MS Dhoni (wk), 6 Kedar Jadhav, 7 Hardik Pandya, 8 Ravindra Jadeja, 9 R Ashwin/Umesh Yadav,10 Bhuvneshwar Kumar, 11 Jasprit Bumrah
Pakistan (possible) 1 Azhar Ali, 2 Fakhar Zaman, 3 Babar Azam, 4 Mohammad Hafeez, 5 Shoaib Malik, 6 Sarfraz Ahmed (capt & wk), 7 Imad Wasim, 8 Mohammad Amir, 9 Shadab Khan, 10 Hasan Ali, 11 Junaid Khan
Pitch and conditions for final
A fresh pitch is being used for the match and appears mostly dry, so perhaps the track will favour batsmen and scores in excess of 300 are likely. The forecast is for a slightly cloudy, but mostly dry day, with temperatures reaching the high twenties.Although Pakistan have an overall lead in the head-to-head stakes, having won 72 matches to India’s 52, they have lost eight of the 10 matches the teams have played in global tournaments.India have scored 1098 runs at a per-batsman average of 91.50 in the tournament, which makes them by a distance the best batting side on show. The next-best average is England’s 41.11.Pakistan’s 31 wickets are the most taken by any team in the Champions Trophy. Since that opening loss to India, they have taken 28 wickets at 23.78 and maintained an economy rate of 4.46.
Three of India’s top-five average higher than 43 against Pakistan – Rohit Sharma (37.90) is the lone exception.
Junaid Khan has taken eight wickets at an average of 21.50 in five matches against India. He has dismissed Kohli three times, and conceded only two runs to him.
India captain Virat Kohli stated that “I don’t see any relevance of the first game here because you can never tell how a particular team starts a tournament. Some teams start very confidently and then they fade off. Some teams might not have the best starts, and they come back amazingly, which Pakistan have done. So everyone is aware of the kind of talent they have in their team, and on their day they can beat any side in the world.” Pakistan coach Mickey Arthur said that “I said before the Edgbaston game against India, that I thought they were really, really calm. But they’re very, very excited now, and there’s a hell of a good vibe in that dressing room. Let’s hope we can pull out our ‘A’ game again tomorrow. If we play our ‘A’ game together and do the basics well, we can beat anybody.”
