Pakistan’s modest bowling attack revived a tactic from the Misbah era, with Ali Usman’s miserly spell and Sajid Khan’s wickets combining to trigger a dramatic West Indies collapse.
For many people, the idea of Pakistani bowling conjures up images of reverse-swinging pacers, doosra-hurling and googly-twirling spinners, of mercurial match winners.
But if you are one of those people, you are hopelessly out of touch.
Anyone watching Pakistan cricket for, I don’t know, the last couple of decades knows that the team hasn’t had many of those types of players for a long while now. And those watching Pakistan cricket seriously would know that during the rare spells when their Test match bowling is good, it follows a tactic which has defined their modern success, a tactic that emerged 15 years ago in the desert, a tactic we can call the slow spin strangle.
On day three of the second Test, Pakistan’s modest bowling attack strangled out West Indies, not through outrageous skills but rather through discipline, control and attrition.
To understand the tactic we have to go back to where it began - in the UAE in 2010, when one Misbah ul Haq became Pakistan’s new captain. A terrorist attack had meant that Misbah's team would play almost a decade in exile in the UAE, while also missing two of their best fast bowlers following a fixing scandal. But over the next seven years, his side turned the UAE into a fortress, and the team briefly became world No.1 in Tests.
And while the brilliant Saeed Ajmal was part of the team’s initial success, the Misbah era's bowling was defined by older, veteran bowlers who, like their captain, had limited skills but tremendous guile and discipline.
The likes of Yasir Shah, Zulfiqar Babar, Abdur Rehman, Mohammad Hafeez, Junaid Khan, Rahat Ali and others all contributed to a bowling attack that was always far greater than the sum of its parts.
At the heart of their methods was attrition.
Back in the day, Test batters were expected to ride out the new ball, play out a tough spell, see off the evening session. But as cricket has evolved in the 21st century, it is often bowlers who have had to play attritional cricket, hoping to avoid batting onslaughts.
And now, it is batters who struggle to deal with attrition.
They are so used to getting bat on ball and scoring frequently that when faced with unrelenting dots, they act out and make mistakes. For bowlers, executing the strangle means tight lines and lengths, often bowling ‘dry’ or ‘negative’ to disincentivise shot-making. This means that while they aren’t necessarily hunting for wickets, they also don’t offer any easy balls to score runs off.
It’s an approach that doesn’t require the bowlers to master several types of swing, or extract outrageous turn, or find mystery balls - it only asks for patience and discipline.
And eventually, the batters implode.
It was a tactic that worked brilliantly in the UAE, and Misbah even had some success with it abroad. The approach also managed to make the best of Pakistani cricketers who lacked the headline-grabbing talents of previous generations.
But Pakistan today are a side long removed from those glory days under Misbah, consistently stuck in the lower reaches of the World Test Championship, one of the worst Test teams in the world over the past few years.
Instead of embracing the patience and discipline of the Misbah era, the PCB has taken more exotic routes recently, using lawn heaters and the like to create treacherous home pitches. Predictably, that short-term fix only yielded short-term improvements, and after a defeat in the first Test against West Indies, Pakistan had lost eight away games in a row and were looking utterly hopeless.
But on day three, Pakistan finally, and perhaps fleetingly, found that old magic again. Two rapid collapses around a late order stand had given the team a narrow lead, but a wayward start by the pacers had effectively ended it.
The show began in the ninth over, when the spinners were introduced. Throughout the rest of the day, Sajid Khan would light up the wickets column, starting with the wicket of Tagenarine Chanderpaul LBW in his first over.
But the fulcrum of this entire session was the man at the other end, Ali Usman. He would bowl 16.5 consecutive overs, conceding only 29. It was his miserliness, the relentless dot balls, that turned the session around.
The two bowled 17 overs together, but Sajid consistently kept offering a boundary ball, with five of his nine overs seeing one go for four. But Sajid was able to attack because Usman was holding the other end down, conceding just 22 off his 10 overs during that time
Usman kept things simple, barely changing his speeds, and sticking to two lines - in the channel, or slightly wider. He also frequently forced the batters to play him forward and rarely offered a chance to score easy runs. It was a ploy that got Kavem Hodge out, who was perhaps trying to work a single into the leg side when he closed the face of his bat too early and was pinned LBW.
But Usman’s discipline truly shone in a superb post-drinks spell in tandem with Mohammad Ali.
The pacer had been wayward at the start of the innings, but here, he was immediately on the mark. Bowling wide of the crease, angling the ball in and seaming it away, Ali had both Roston Chase and Shai Hope in all sorts of trouble. In five overs he generated seven plays and misses, as both batters were suckered into hanging out their bats at deliveries they didn’t need to. Just 10 runs came off the eight overs Usman and Ali bowled together to Roston Chase and Shai Hope.
Hope in particular was in trouble, having decided to start staying back in his crease, unlike Chase, who was using his height to get forward. He survived several dicey moments with this approach, trusting his fast hands to see him through. But eventually, the long dry spell without any runs had upped the pressure considerably. When Sajid Khan returned, his fourth ball kept low and Hope, rooted deep in his crease, was struck plumb in front. Cue another gregarious Sajid celebration, but this wicket, which came after such a long runless spell, was a true team effort.
Where Sajid doesn’t often need help is against left-handers, and the wicket of Tagenarine Chanderpaul was true to his reputation, playing for the turn and ultimately missing it. But the dismissal of Amir Jangoo was as much about the strangle as the spin. After a spell of 50 balls which yielded just 18 runs, Jangoo was visibly stressed. In the previous over against Sajid, he seemed to have been spooked by a play and a miss when he came forward, only for the ball to turn sharply away, within a hair of his bat. Perhaps that was why he was stuck in his crease the next over, and ended up being comprehensively bowled after completely missing the turn and playing down the wrong line.
Much to Sajid’s delight, 18 overs later when he dismissed Hope, West Indies responded by sending a left-handed nightwatchman to face him. It only took two balls for the mustachioed offie to strike with what was his easiest wicket so far.
In hindsight, Hope’s wicket opened the floodgates. After a run of 10 wicketless overs for just eight runs, West Indies lost three wickets for four runs in the final 5.1 overs.
And the final wicket of the session owed a little to Pakistani captain Babar Azam as well. With the batters already frustrated and looking for runs, Babar wasted some time off the penultimate ball of the day while setting his field. Eventually, when the ball arrived, it was one of the most leg-sided deliveries of Ali Usman’s spell.
Perhaps eager to get on with it, Chase got himself in a tangle and spooned one straight back to the bowler. It was a fitting reward for the spinner who was the real star of the show, Sajid’s wickets notwithstanding.
It was also a welcome relief for Pakistan, who snapped a spell of truly demoralising Test cricket.
New coach Sarfaraz Ahmed had once been part of Misbah’s storied side, and was perhaps useful in reviving this forgotten tactic of slow spin strangles. But in their trademark hilarious style, Pakistan successfully pulled off this tactic after dropping one of their finest proponents in Mohammad Abbas.
It is that sort of move that gives pause to the idea of Pakistan managing to sustain this tactic for the coming tour of England.
Despite the success Misbah’s side had there a decade ago, there are no guarantees if this Pakistan side will manage to retain anything from one day to the next.
But for one match at least, Pakistani fans could savour a brilliant display of the tactic that had once made them kings.
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