After drawing second test match of the series against New Zealand, Pakistan has won their first Test Cricket series after a gap of 11 Test Series spanned over a period of 4 years and 2 months. Bari der ki mehraan aate aate!
But I have a comment on today’s match. Can you imagine Pakistan going for a draw under Imran Khan from a position where 66 runs were needed off 11 overs (NZ actually end up bowling 14 overs) and 6 wickets were in hand.
Imran would have gone for a match result in such situations whereas Misbah chose the safe result of a draw today. Pakistan scored only 18 runs in the last 14 overs. It will definitely look good on Misbah’s resume’ and he may even get World Cup captaincy over from Shahid Afridi tomorrow.
Now I do want to give credit where its due. Misbah is still commendable to have scored 6 fifites in his last 6 innings (70*, 99, 62, 58*, 77 and 76*). Misbah and Younis Khan held the whole batting line together in this test match.
Pakistan’s last Test series win was against West Indies in December of 2006. Following is the summary of Test series results since Pakistan won it the last time.
(1) 2010-11 Pakistan v New Zealand in NZ (1-0) (Jan 19, 2011)
(2) 2010-11 Pakistan v South Africa in UAE (0-0)
(3) 2010 Pakistan v England in England (1-3)
(4) 2010 Pakistan v Australia in England (1-1)
(5) 2009-10 Pakistan v Australia in Australia (0-3)
(6) 2009-10 Pakistan v New Zealand in NZ (1-1)
(7) 2009 Pakistan v Sri Lanka in SL (0-2)
(8) 2008 Pakistan v Sri Lanka in Pakistan (0-0)
(9) 2007-08 Pakistan v India in India (0-1)
(10) 2007-08 Pakistan v South Africa in Pakistan (0-1)
(11) 2006-07 Pakistan v South Africa in South Africa (1-2)
(12) 2006-07 Pakistan v West Indies in Pakistan (2-0) (Dec 1, 2006)
Nice article Owais. One correction though. In your statistics, you missed the “2010 Pak vs Aus in England (1-1)”. Add it there. One word, though we had starved for a win, we managed drawn series against SA, and had some good match wins in between too. Anyway, it was a delight to see this much needed series win.
pakistan missed a great chance to clean sweap the kiwis. may be the result of so many series losses in past. however it is good trip for team. no scandle is the better news for pakis than winning
i m glad
Imagine if they had gone for a victor, but had lost in the process… imagine what the national reaction would have been. So this was smart strategy.
Owais, I sat watching much of the final day’s play – a lot of it with my son who is finally getting into cricket – and I must confess I also kept thinking that Pakistan should have tried harder for a win. But I cannot really blame them after all they have been through, but they really seemed to be playing for a draw.
They DID play well (specially Misbah and Younis) but there was an abundance of caution. I don’t it was on purpose, it was because the fear of the team collapsing was too great. This was probably needed after the first wickets were lost quickly. But I do think that stint between lunch and tea needed more aggressive cricket from Pakistan. Even after Younis’s loss, I think we could have at least tried for making this a 2-0 victory.
On the other hand, I sympathize with the excellent comment made by Ramiz Raja towards the end, when he said that this situation (being in the driving seat and smelling Test victories) is now so unfamiliar to this team that maybe the instinct of taking the risks in Test cricket has been drained.
Anyhow, as you can see, I have rather mixed feelings. I was still looking for the Asif Iqbal, Miandad type Test finish (remember the series against India) but I do realize that these guys have to rebuild from scratch; and from that perspective this is good news…. best news of all was that once again it really was a team playing as a team… that, of course, is priceless!