Slowly does it in Dubai's spin city for Pakistan

Pakistan spinners have never taken, in nearly 60 years, as many wickets in a calendar year as they did last year, 102 in all.

Mohammad Hafeez dismissed Alastair Cook at The Dubai International Cricket Stadium in Dubai.

On deeper inspection, the more unsettling aspect of watching Pakistan over the past year - like the feeling, post-advertising, that what you've got is not what you were sold but will have to do - has not been their generally attritional, even dour approach. It has been that they have spun their way through it.
Pakistan, as well we all know and love knowing, is a fast-bowling country; nothing about its land, but everything about its people is wired to bowling quick, a quirk of recent genealogy rather than old geography. But the last year has been for spin.
Pakistan spinners have never taken, in nearly 60 years, as many wickets in a calendar year as they did in 2011, 102 in all.
Only twice have spinners bowled more balls in a year than the last, once in 2000 and once in 1987, a year that belonged to the modest duo of Iqbal Qasim, Tauseef Ahmed and the gloriously immodest Abdul Qadir.
Partly circumstances have necessitated this, the loss of two opening bowlers and matches on surfaces where spin is more durable.
But it is not as if there is a dearth of pacemen suddenly; with Umar Gul, Junaid Khan, Wahab Riaz, Aizaz Cheema, and others at the door, there can't be.
Yet that they have felt secondary to proceedings is mostly because the trio of Mohammad Hafeez, Abdur Rehman and Saeed Ajmal has been so outstanding.
Ajmal, of course, demands noticing. His spirit is very much that of Qadir, a man of whom in Pakistan we conclude, kya cheez he ("what a thing he is").
Only, he is Qadir on happy pills. He is witty, entirely shorn of ego and not afraid - as with the teesra - to play "the game" spinners often have to play.
Had another leg spinner, Danish Kaneria, had Ajmal's personality, he might have been a greater bowler.
But Ajmal has also become smarter and sharper over the past year, as if he has understood better what his gifts are.
He bowls the doosra just enough now to ensure its threat is as troubling as its actuality, and his faith in his off-break has grown.
He is also, as England discovered on the first day when there was not so much turn, far cleverer with his angles than gets recognised.
And let us never forget the sterling services he has rendered to reviving the greatest subgenre of cricket, the appeal, almost single-handedly.
No one has improved more as a bowler than Hafeez though.
He has always felt that being a batsman has helped his bowling work out what batsmen do not like to face.
And what they do not like, especially left-handers, is coming across a bureaucrat of a bowler, whose first instinct is to deny them everything: flight, room, pace, time, space, angle.
But the central point around whom both have danced and swirled over the year has been Rehman, in many ways the key to the entire operation. He is no less a character than Ajmal, though across 22 yards they are two different species. But Rehman is the safety net for the other two, the home to come back to every night; solid, safe, always there at the same spot, and designed to keep things in check.
It is from his squeeze that the others benefit more often than you would think and he will pull out the dream ball, just to let you know that he can.
It has helped immensely that they have been handled by Misbah-ul-Haq, who appears to have a feel for this particular task. For the kind of strategy Pakistan work - tighten one end, threaten from the other, in other words, the choke - the right fields are necessary.
More importantly, key positions such as short midwicket, square leg, point, close-in fielders, have to be set at precisely the right angles.
Because it is not just that wickets have to be taken; with this line of thinking, it is as important for the run-rate to be stifled, to build the pressure that, in this new age of rapid Test scoring, brings its own reward.
It is thus no surprise to discover that no team have conceded fewer runs per over this past year than Pakistan (2.79).
How important the man handling the spinners is apparent in the problems Shoaib Malik briefly had in late 2007 against South Africa, when he too tried to lead with spin.
It felt wrong then and it did not work.
It still does not feel right, but it does not seem to be working so badly.
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