It was just the kind of ball bashing that the crowds love to watch. One-day cricket was at its best in the first game of the series and the crowds must have enjoyed every minute of it. It wasn’t just for the masses though and there was plenty for the connoisseurs also to get their heads nodding with approval.
For starters there was Sachin Tendulkar playing those trademark drives in the ‘V’ and running furiously between the wickets. He got another ton and while most of it was text book stuff, there was enough of the unorthodox to get the viewers jumping. He may have been outscored by Irfan Pathan but the little champion had obviously set his stall for a century after the calls for his head post the Karachi Test loss. The century proved to the knee jerkers that there’s lots of cricket left to come from him.
Sehwag once again disappointed. His recent record in one-dayers has not lived upto his Test deeds. One gets the impression that he is trying to score at supersonic speed when his usual speed will do nicely. Still with Pathan and Dhoni coming good, his early loss wasn’t felt. Dhoni promoted up the order from his Test batting position pummelled the bowling in his usual manner and along with Tendulkar gave just the spring board for the later batsmen to launch an all out attack.
Apart from Yuvraj and to a certain extent the skipper Dravid, nobody was quite able to do that with the last few wickets falling in a heap. What it showed once again was that the batsmen who are set and scoring need to stay as long as they can and not throw their hand away for it is never easy for the new batsmen to start hitting from the word go. In any case if they were capable of doing so wouldn’t they be batting up the order? India thus lost out on perhaps another 25 runs or so.
How handy those runs would have been was borne out later when the D/L method came into play as the light deteriorated fast. Not that Pakistan were ever cowed down by the big Indian total.
Buoyed by the win in Karachi and their general dominance of Indian bowlers, the Pakistanis were off on the chase in a lively manner. Salman Butt, who was the one batsman who missed out on the high scoring in the Tests, came good with a strokeful century. Kamran Akmal who was the man who thwarted India in the Test at Karachi and gave Pakistani bowlers a decent score to defend, helped Butt put on a good opening. Shoaib Malik making a comeback after this father’s sad demise missed out on a century. Both Butt and Malik have shown a liking for Indian bowling in the one-dayers and will be a big threat in the remainder of the series.
Inzaman-ul-Haq found a different way to be dismissed and the two scorers in the Tests Mohammad Yousuf and Younis Khan did not get too many overs in which to score the big runs. Still Younis Khan would have been aware that the D/L method would come into play and he ensured that Pakistan were ahead of the target and they win the first game of the series when the umpires finally called off play. Pakistan were still in the hunt of course and would have got the runs needed, so in a way the nail-biting surprise was solved artificially but the game itself was everything that one-day cricket is all about.
If the first game can be that exciting, what lies in store for the rest of the series?
