Two weeks before meeting in the 2017 Australian Open final, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were sick and injured athletes who may have been fading into the twilight. When, against all odds, they ended up facing each other in the final, the victorious Federer famously said: “Tennis is a cruel sport, there are no ties, but if there were one, I would have gladly accepted.” One tonight and share it with Rafa.”
Sajid Khan and Noman Ali had also disappeared from sight until a fortnight ago, having played no first-class cricket and no realistic ambitions of an imminent return to the Pakistan side. So when they did and ended up sharing 39 of England’s 40 wickets in the last two Tests, Sajid, awarded the Player of the Series trophy, expressed much the same sentiment.
“nomi bhai “He is one of the most experienced players in Pakistan’s domestic circuit,” Sajid said at the presentation. “We should share these Player of the Series awards. He is a great spinner who has also mentored and helped me, so all the credit goes to him.”
This will be an unforgettable series for England, but Pakistan will be remembered for this duo. That they ran over England’s batsmen seems inevitable in retrospect; but when England swayed to 211 for 2 in the first innings in Multan – on a pitch that Sajid said offered something “even if the spinner didn’t do anything” – the reputations of Sajid and Noman were at stake.
And while Sajid insists that the match situation did not worry him, the weight of expectations on him was a different matter. “There wasn’t that much pressure [of the series] but [there was] some comeback pressure. The captain, the vice-captain and the entire team were blending in well. “We played domestic cricket together, on these kinds of wickets, so there wasn’t a lot of pressure.”
Noman, 38, has the experience to never take any opportunity for granted. “I feel like it’s been a while since we performed well in Pakistan,” he said, sitting next to Sajid at the post-series press conference. “We are grateful to have had the conditions to have the opportunity to win the series in this way. The way we came back is especially satisfactory and we hope to have similar conditions in the future and pose difficulties for other teams.”
But Noman also acknowledged the extent to which Pakistan got its way here. The plan to swerve to turn was, like the surfaces they decided to use, half-baked. Their first-choice player Abrar Ahmed was out of the series, and the three players called up by Pakistan had not played any first-class cricket since January. If England were defeated, it would be thanks to the muscle memory and experience of Sajid and Noman.
If Pakistan was going to employ this strategy in the future (which Noman unsurprisingly supported), he believed they had to do it right. “I think if you want to groom the spinners, you need to play more red-ball cricket,” he said. “In first-class cricket you get all kinds of conditions, with new balls and old balls. When you do that, you get a lot of experience.”
