First Test, Pakistan v Australia (Dubai) – Day 5: Adrift, disoriented

Pakistan 454 (Younis Khan 106, Sarfraz Ahmed 109, MG Johnson 3/39 (31))

Australia 303 (DA Warner 133, Yasir Shah 3/66)

Pakistan 2d/286 (Ahmed Shehzad 131, Younis Khan 103*)

Start of play, Day 5.

Australia 2nd innings 59/4 (CJL Rogers 23*, SPD Smith 3*, 23 ov)

 

“I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence–that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.”

– Salman Rushdie, “Midnight’s Children”

 

 

The day five story is the story of when my kick-run-jump-leap-destroy-look-at-me-look-at-me-look-at-me child self of brashness of thought and brashness of action crashed in upon the wizard of self-reflection and spin and turn and drift who was working hunch-backed and mysteriously away over his looking water pond in the desert of Dubai.

 

The Australian cricket team, I had been but a pre-natal quavering in India in 2012/13 as I lost 0-4 (and despite (yes despite) winning four-out-of-four tosses of the coin and on every occasion choosing wisely to bat). The dusty wickets and shifty eyes of millions of conjurers left my petulant swings of the bat looking as one-dimensional boorishness; my leaden-footed indiscriminant advances to the spinners looking recklessly speculative at best.

 

I was born into dusty wickets in England in 2013 as G Swann and reverse swinging J Anderson bullied and gloated and danced over the collapsing and technically deficient batting house of cards I constructed time after time after time (losing the games where I lost the toss, drawing those where I won the toss. The toss, the toss. Luck plays no part?)

 

I came of a talking and of a walking age in Australia in 2013/14 beating the deckchair English 5-0 on fast pitches (and hark, yes, I did win the toss for the first four matches to lead 4-0. But why do you ask?)

 

And I developed a self-confident manner and cocksure strut in South Africa in 2013/14 beating the best in the world on their home grounds, 2-1. It was a time marking the end of my childhood. Losing the toss and winning the First Test at Centurion (see?!). Losing the toss again but losing the Second Test at Port Elizabeth. And then, the decider in Cape Town. The biggest of my life, the game that marked the end of my childhood and start of the next phase of this life. I won the toss, won the match, took the last wicket required with minutes to spare, and I was success, I was life itself, I was winning from tight spots and I was application for reward. I was belief. So many alternative realities and open doors and always the possible the possible the possible.

 

And so to the bewitching sands of the desert and its shadow people, desert decorated incongruously with omnipresent polished western steel and polished western concrete and a polished western glass formed from building sites staffed by a gigantic casual workforce of labourers too disposable to ask for better conditions and thereby going weeks months years without ever seeing their loved ones back home on the sub-continent and also staffed by many western office types too greedy and besotted by the dollar to see their loved ones back home in Australia and instead hoping believing praying that the telegrammed money sent back to Pondicherry Hyderabad Pokhara Sydney Brisbane Melbourne may be felt by those left behind as warmly as a hug.

 

And so into calamity I walked as a young male lion walks blithely into a trap as the hunters of Pakistan captured me and for five days brought me systematically and crushingly undone amid appeals and yelps and floggings and clatterings of wickets and wallops of boundaries and eons of dot-balls under the sun the heat the shimmering sky. I had lost the toss.

 

I was found wanting and left in the desert to ponder as my spinners were crashed carted smacked to all parts and as my top order largely threw their hands away through acts of impatience overreach stupidity and the schemers and swarmers of Pakistan and the timeless presence alone of the Pakistan members throbbed and blinded my sunspotted vision. I was out. I was done. I was cooked.

 

I battled on using only a rare combination of adolescent verve and newly found adolescent resolve and beyond any reasonable anticipation, prolonged the game beyond tea on the final day. But an inevitability prolonged is still an inevitability.

 

Pakistan defeated Australia by 221 runs

Pakistan lead the two test series 1-0.

 

Pakistan 454 & 286/2d

Australia 303 & 216 (91.1 ov)

 

The next step on my very faltering and very human journey I will take on October 30; Day 1 of the Second Test. I wonder…