Pakistan’s Sami Aslam, radiating calm, has shown he is mastering the art of run-scoring

Osman Samiuddin writes even if Sami Aslam is not the permanent solution to the permanent problem of Pakistan's opening - though, also, he just may be - he was at least the solution in the third Test.

Pakistan's Sami Aslam acknowledges the applause of the crowd as he walks back to the pavilion after losing his wicket for 82 during play on the second day of the third Test on Friday. Paul Ellis / AFPShow more

Inzamam-ul-Haq is not only a man of few words, he is a man of precise ones, unwilling to expend vocabulary just as he was any more energy than was necessary while playing.

Once, famously, when a reporter asked him about the possibility of a match having been fixed, he leaned over as slow and sure as he often did into a cover drive, gathered his thoughts and replied with no emotion or change in expression: “Shut up.”

He was sauntering around Edgbaston on Thursday in his capacity as Pakistan's chief selector, no doubt pleased that the two changes to Pakistan's XI for this Test have reaped such immediate and healthy reward.

Now Inzamam had been out of cricket for a while until he became chief selector and Inzamam being out of cricket means he was really out of it. There is little chance he would have seen too much of Sami Aslam as he was setting the U-19 world alight. Thursday would have been the first time he would have seen him bat in serious circumstances and certainly the toughest test he would have seen him undergone.

His assessment was exact and worth paraphrasing here. There are some batsmen who are shot-makers he said – and not revealing those he named does not make it any more difficult to know which names he took – and some who know how to score runs. Aslam, he said, was the latter.

No matter how many times we will see Aslam bat over the rest of his career, this truth will be enough in guiding us. It is certainly not a dig and neither does it imply an incapability to play shots. He has them, as anyone who has seen his limited overs performances at U-19 level will attest.

In his 82 on Friday there were a few you might want to GIF, lead among them a little straight drive off Chris Woakes. But they just do not seem as important – even of the two sixes Pakistan hit off Moeen Ali, it was probably Azhar Ali’s that will stick more in the mind and ask yourself how often you can say that of any shot Azhar plays.

No stroke of Aslam’s was as memorable as that ultimately which got him runs, which is to say there were plenty. There were the bunts on the off, the easy pushes off his thighs and hips. And there were the leaves, which were guaranteed greater attention than they might because it was something the man he replaced – Shan Masood – was unable to do.

That kind of judgment and its suggestion of an intelligent batting mind was present through the entirety of his innings. After he twice lap-swept Moeen for boundaries, those did not seem as important as the effect they had on England’s field: duly they moved square leg to leg slip and Aslam dinked a little single to a vacant square leg.

Twice he went long periods without a boundary, first for 13 overs before lunch – brought to an end by that drive off Woakes – and then for over an hour after lunch. In that first period his scoring stalled, moving from 10 to 15. In the second he went from 23 to 47. But at no point during either did the fact of no boundaries, or even a supply of runs, seem to matter in the context of Pakistan’s innings, or, more importantly, to perturb his. Throughout he knew where and how he would get his runs and he did.

You can go through this Pakistan batting order and, in conditions outside Asia and sometimes against the better bowlers inside Asia, feel that no matter how long some of them stay at the crease, they rarely look truly settled, or at least not in the sense that the best young batsmen of this age do.

That is what would have pleased Pakistan the most, that at no stage after he was set did Aslam look like an implosion was a matter of inevitability, with only the details for the eventual demise to be inked in. As good a batsman as he has shown himself to be, to give off this sense of permanence in his first Test innings in England is what perhaps stood out – you have to go back a decade to find as assured an innings by a Pakistani opener in England (Mohammad Hafeez at The Oval in case you felt like turning your mind inside out briefly) and maybe a decade before that for anyone to have done it with any regularity. He batted as if completely ignorant of the not-so-pretty context of being a Pakistani opener in England.

Such was the force of this sense that radiated out from Aslam, as Azhar Ali would later admit, it actually helped settle him down. For a man playing his ninth Test in England and 48th overall to say that about a man playing his first in England and third anywhere is, well, it is something.

The curse of history, of course, is that it is always there and unavoidable and so to end on a note of caution is not only wise but necessary. Pakistan have burnt through way too many openers over the last 20 years to even begin to imagine that they might have found a permanent solution to a permanent problem. Too many have come, impressed like Aslam, maybe even for longer and with greater force, and then whoosh, gone, just like that.

Perhaps it is enough to imagine that for now, a Pakistan opener may have changed the course of a Test in England – and even that is hardly set in stone – and with it, just maybe, the series.

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