(Photo: Getty Images)
Derek Pringle explains how Pakistan’s gameplan confounded England and how Eoin Morgan’s side should have reacted
So, England messed up their match against Pakistan because they had played their previous one at Edgbaston. At least that is what Eoin Morgan, the team’s captain, has essentially said after claiming: “It was too much of an ask for us to adjust to,” after his players were confronted by a slow, unresponsive pitch in Cardiff.
What Morgan said about making rapid changes to plans and shot selection may be true but he said it as if England’s batsmen were helpless to adjust. Actually, his team were well-placed to post a very competitive 270-280 when Joe Root was at the crease (they were 128-2 in the 28th over). Instead, their meltdown came in the last 20 overs when they froze in the face of Pakistan’s clever use of reverse-swing and slower balls.
Reverse-swing has been rare since the International Cricket Council reintroduced the use of a new white ball at each end, but not impossible as Pakistan have shown during this Champions Trophy.
Against England on Wednesday they were aided by a used pitch – drier and less grassy than it had been against Sri Lanka two days earlier – which helped to abrade the ball (a vital requirement to achieve reverse swing). But Pakistan also facilitated the process by getting their three spinners into the game early so that they could get the ball roughed up and swinging between the 30-50th over, a period England have targeted recently as the moment Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler floor the accelerator and take their score beyond the reach of most opponents.
Several things will have confused England’s batsmen. For one, they will have watched Pakistan’s game against Sri Lanka on Monday and seen the Pakistan pace bowlers mostly bang the ball in short. The playing area at Cardiff is much bigger square of the wicket than straight while Sri Lanka’s batsmen, most of them slight of build, get more power hitting off the front foot than the back. So there were logical reasons for it.
It would therefore be a fair assessment that they would adopt the same tactic for Morgan’s team except that they didn’t, at least not in the final 20 overs, which is where England stalled horribly like a Reliant Robin trying to go up Ffordd pen Llech in Snowdonia.
Instead, having cannily got their spinners on early in order to speed the roughing up of the two balls, they got them reverse-swinging. Suddenly, the tactic was to probe the blockhole with yorkers and a close-set field and England, having been sold a dummy, panicked accordingly.
For variation the pace bowlers, Junaid Khan, Rumman Raees and the brilliant Hasan Ali, bowled well-disguised slower balls which sat tight in the pitch. Mostly, though, they took the surface out of the equation, cramping the batsmen for room with both their toe-crushing length and tight-to-the-pads line.
The upshot of this is that when swing like that, and we are not talking feet here only inches, is bowled with such control, the runs dry up, especially the boundaries. Now we all know how that frustrates modern batsmen who seem unable to be satisfied by keeping the score ticking with clever placement and rotation of the strike.
Take Stokes, a superb batsman on pitches where the ball comes on and he can use his timing and power to blast it through or over the infield. At Cardiff, Stokes made 34 off 64 balls without hitting a boundary, something I suspect is unheard of when he makes more than 10.
When you are under the pump to that degree you can still score at a run-a-ball through singles, something Javed Miandad and Mark Waugh used to do as second nature. But Stokes is used to hitting the ball hard and meatily and as such derives little satisfaction from working the ball into gaps and waiting for his partner to do the same.
As a result, he soaked up a lot of dot balls against Pakistan (though he was not the only one), which in turn made him frustrated – an emotion written all over his dismissal as he tried to launch Hasan’s slower ball into the Rhonda.
Countering such clever bowling is not easy but it can be done, providing you are confident that your revised total will be competitive. For Morgan’s England team, 300 has been the new par score of late, so anything falling short is likely to make them feel insecure. But then not knowing what a good total is batting first is perhaps the modern cricketer’s greatest fear and not limited just to England.
Going back to Javed, as clever and innovative batsman as there has ever been, his solution for yorkers was to bat out of the crease and then either jump back and turn it into a half-volley or lurch forward to turn it into a full toss. Either way, timing and the clever placement of one’s shots from a short backlight – not through strength and a big swing of the bat – are the key.
England’s paltry total was made to look even worse when Pakistan’s openers raced to 100 and a contest worthy of the name never really materialised. The problem was Morgan tried to blast them out with his pace bowlers, all four getting a go before he turned to spin.
With it being too early in the piece for reverse-swing, and with no sideways movement being offered by more conventional means, putting speed on the ball on a sluggish pitch simply helped the batsmen time it better.
The frustration for England and their fans is that they had played, to that point, the best and most persuasive cricket of the tournament. Indeed, had they gone on to win the trophy, something I tipped them to do, I would have conceded that they were a better 50-over side than the one which lost the 1992 World Cup final, also to Pakistan.
But this defeat was so timid that I am not prepared to hand over that particular accolade just yet.
