Humiliation in Mirpur: Pakistan’s World T20 dream is over

West Indies whirlwind pulverise four-time semi-finalists.

KARACHI:

For 15 overs, the do-or-die group two game of the ICC WorldTwenty20 between Pakistan and the West Indies looked like one-way traffic – the men in green had reduced the dangerous batsmen from the Caribbean to a mere 84 runs. Half the side was back in the pavilion and it looked like Pakistan’s match!

The last five overs on the same wicket against the blazing bats of Dwayne Bravo and Darren Sammy blew the 2009 champions away. Zulfiqar Babar, Umar Gul, Saeed Ajmal and Sohail Tanvir had no answers and later their batting colleagues were equally clueless.

West Indies posted 166, recovering from 81 for five in the 14th over of the match; the momentum that Sammy’s men gained was so intense that Pakistan’s batsmen succumbed and their panic-ridden strokes and inability to read the spinners turned the game into a drab – no contest within overs.

So the dream is over! Pakistan’s proud record of making it to at least the semi-final stage of all World T20 events to date has been well and truly dusted away by the dancing, singing and joyous Calypso cricketers.

The 2009 winners looked stunned and shocked after the onslaught by Sammy and Bravo and had no fight left in them after spinner Samuel Badree ran through the top order in their reply.

After the match, Hafeez had little to say. The captain apologised to the nation for the embarrassing defeat (this is West Indies’ biggest win in the T20 format).

“This wasn’t the best of performance from Pakistan. We didn’t play well in the final four overs. The credit goes to West Indies,” said Hafeez. “In the first 16 overs, we bowled very well, but they got the momentum in the final four overs. We panicked a little bit early in the chase.”

But the captain and his ‘experienced’ batsmen have a lot to answer to – little panic is not what the fans saw! Pakistani batsmen, who have a reputation of playing spin bowling better than most, could not figure out which way Badree or Sunil Narine were turning the ball.

Kamran and Umar Akmal, Shoaib Malik and Sohaib Maqsood all perished attempting shots that were ungainly and ugly, to put it mildly.

Hafeez, who scored a painstaking 19 off 32 balls, also looked hopelessly out of touch and froze as the pressure mounted. Shahid Afridi and Sohail Tanvir cleared the boundary towards the end but their contributions only helped Pakistan get past their previous lowest T20 score of 74.  After bowing out abysmally, the team is expected to return home in a day or two and for the next few months, the cricketers have no international cricket scheduled.

But the selectors and the team management are not expected to get away easily from the harrowing loss, and there is no reason that they should. The selection of Kamran and Malik had raised many eyebrows before the team left and the so-called T20 specialists did very little in the four games they played.

Their insipid display might finally be their last in the shortest format of the game. Hopefully the rebuilding process would start now, hopefully the inconsistent selections would end and hopefully the batsmen would learn to absorb the pressure of a chase in a big match.

But maybe we are pinning too much on hope alone.


Published in The Express Tribune, April 2^nd, 2014.