Stumps update – Pakistan 286/4
If this developing England side are to take any lessons from this tour, they should take the one they learnt on the final afternoon of the opening day at Sheikh Zayed Cricket Stadium in Abu Dhabi.
Having toiled for two sessions without much fortune – and some self-inflicted misfortune – they struck back towards the close of play. An excellent post-tea session saw them dismiss the veteran middle-order pair of Younis Khan and Misbah-ul-Haq to keep Pakistan to 286 for four. Shoaib Malik’s unbeaten 124, on his return to the Test side over five years after his last appearance, kept them at bay. But the Test is finely poised.
The session began with some celebration for Pakistan. Younis needed 19 runs at the start to go past Javed Miandad and become his country’s leading Test run-scorer.
He got there in some style as well, lifting Moeen Ali over midwicket for six but there was a misplaced urgency about his innings today. Twice he reverse-swept Moeen and tried to create strokes where none existed.
He fell to a well-worked England plan. They put in two short mid-ons, next to each other and on 38, Younis drove Stuart Broad straight to one of them, the captain Alastair Cook.
Soon after James Anderson dismissed Misbah, not without raising a few eyebrows. The on-field umpire Paul Reiffel rejected a caught-behind appeal when Misbah was on four. England reviewed and S Ravi, the TV umpire, overturned the decision; presumably he picked up a sound that could only have been an edge on the stump mic.
That was due reward for persistent and diligent bowling, though the same cannot be said of the fielding. Having already dropped a regulation chance in the morning and taken a wicket off a no-ball, the last thing they wanted as the day closed was to drop another chance.
But they did, Asad Shafiq given a life on 10, when Ian Bell dropped a simpler chance at second slip than the one he gave to Mohammad Hafeez in the morning.
That will ratchet up the pressure on Bell when he comes out to bat later in the Test.
That perhaps is the other lesson of the day. You have to hold on to your chances all around the world, but here especially, where bowlers have to work harder than elsewhere to create a chance in the first place.
Tea update – Pakitsan 173/2
Mohammad Hafeez and Shoaib Malik tightened the screws on England on the opening afternoon of the first Test at the Sheikh Zayed Cricket Stadium in Abu Dhabi. A wicket in the last over before tea, however, provided some relief to an England side hitherto intent on fluffing chances. At 173-2, with Younis Khan now in, it could still be a long finish to the day.
Hafeez fell two runs short of a ninth Test hundred, leg-before to Ben Stokes three balls before the end of the session.
Until then he had dominated a 168-run stand with Malik that, over the course of the afternoon, had begun to look decidedly ominous.
England had a moment or two and only themselves to blame for not separating the pair. Hafeez had been dropped in the morning on 7 and nine overs after lunch it was Malik’s turn to profit; he edged a wide, full length ball from Stuart Broad straight to Joe Root at gully.
He was on 40 at the time and Pakistan had just brought up their century. This was the opening England needed, only for replays to show that Broad had overstepped.
That miss proved to be crucial. Malik and Hafeez upped the scoring rate thereafter. The latter was the dominator, using the crease particularly well to punish debutant Adil Rashid’s leg-spin. As he had in the morning, Hafeez was unafraid to come down the pitch to loft him straight.
He had a little run in with Stokes after edging a streaky boundary but that only seemed to briefly rouse him. He took it out on Rashid in the next over, slog-sweeping and driving him for consecutive fours.
Malik was more cautious but looked essentially untroubled, working his way unobstrusively to a ninth Test fifty.
England persisted, mixing up their lengths, occasionally concentrating on the short ball, and finding some reverse as well. Rashid has had a chastening debut so far, going at nearly six an over off his ten.
They do, however, now have Stokes’s late intervention to build on.
Lunch update – Pakistan 82/1
Pakistan's Mohammad Hafeez and Shoaib Malik worked their way past an early loss in the opening session of the Test series against England at the Sheikh Zayed Cricket Stadium in Abu Dhabi. At 82 for one into, it can cautiously be called a strong position as well.
There was no escape from the sun for England’s bowlers on a bright morning. The pacemen were tight and with better catching might have gone into lunch with more than the solitary wicket.
The morning was unmistakably Hafeez and Malik’s though. The pair seemingly emerged from the same identikit of off-spinning all-rounders in the early 2000s, and to see them batting together within the first hour of a Test in 2015 felt like some surreal throwback.
The sight of Malik in whites in particular was odd – this was a first Test in over five years and his first first-class match in nearly a year. And to be fair, after some early nervousness, both acquitted themselves comfortably, so that it never felt as if either was out of place.
Hafeez had some fortune early, Ian Bell dropped a regulation edge at second slip off James Anderson; Hafeez was 7 at the time, and Pakistan had lost Shan Masood a few overs before.
Both players have well over a decade’s experience of international cricket so they knew they simply had to bide their time and wait for England’s spinners to come on to profit.
Sure enough, as soon as debutant Adil Rashid came on, Hafeez went at him. A four steered through point in the leg-spinner’s first over was followed in the second by a charge down the pitch and straight loft for another.
Those shots added to a pleasant array of boundaries – off the faster bowlers, the pair was happy to find gaps behind square on the off. The shot of the morning came from Malik, an arrow-straight drive down the ground off Mark Wood.
Wood, Stuart Broad and Anderson bowled well, though much of what they created came off shorter balls. Masood was bowled after an Anderson bouncer hit his helmet and crashed down onto the stumps.
In the 19th over, Hafeez fended off a rapid short ball from Wood exactly to where a forward short leg would have been: there was not one and an opportunity had gone.
By the end of the session, as the pair had put on 77, Pakistan would have felt calmer than in the morning. Misbah-ul-Haq won his seventh toss in eight Tests in Abu Dhabi but was hit by the withdrawal of Yasir Shah in the morning.
That compelled him into a rare moan about the "mismanagement" of a squad, but by lunch, the frustration was likely to have eased.
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