Only in the aftermath of the match is it really possible to appreciate the contribution that Alastair Cook made to England’s cause.
After the light closed in and the match was drawn with them tantalisingly close to an unforeseen victory against Pakistan it was Adil Rashid who took the plaudits of the day and quite right too. His recovery from what might have been a traumatic experience was outstanding, a credit to his strength of mind and to his captain, colleagues and backroom staff who helped him through it. The experience might have broken him. Instead it has made him, the only bowler in Test history to concede a hundred wicketless runs or more in his debut innings and return a five-wicket analysis in the second. Any doubts about his temperament or skill levels, not least from this quarter, were dispelled. He upped his pace but kept control and spun the ball hard, achieving the in-dip that opens a right-handed batsman up before ripping the ball across the bows.
It was part of the theatre of the final day of a match that for four days had been drudgery to watch, if not play. Twelve sessions, almost 347 overs, had produced 1,092 runs and only 16 wickets to show for it. On the final day 15 more fell for the addition of 276. There are factors other than the obvious one concerning the pitch itself: notionally, the two catches missed by Ian Bell, and the no-ball bowled by Stuart Broad that ought to have brought a wicket, cost England 309 runs. Rarely can the imperative to take what scraps are on offer be more starkly shown. Pakistan, meanwhile, will recognise that Cook was able to bat for 100 overs after he was dropped for the first time. Take these chances and the game might have run a different course.
Then there is the ball. This correspondent has written before about the Kookaburra ball as an ordinary product that goes soft far too quickly and suddenly. Earlier in the year it was shown what was possible with the use of a specially manufactured Dukes ball that held its shape, shine and hardness longer and deteriorated gradually. On these sort of concrete surfaces the Kookaburra, as much as the pitch itself, kills the game.
This being said, the surface in the Sheikh Zayed Stadium was poor, not because it was flat (and it did start to turn even on the third day) but because all the pace had been sapped out of it so that the first ball of the match found the edge and skittered along the ground and the second was taken down by Jos Buttler’s ankles. The rest of the square has a good grass covering and, if more of this had been left on, there would surely have been more pace and carry, which, after all, is what bowlers crave above anything.
It will now be down to the match referee, Andy Pycroft, to decide how to mark it. There may be a political element to this. In 2014 the Trent Bridge pitch was rated poor by the match referee, David Boon, after a desperately dull match against India, for which Nottinghamshire were officially reprimanded by the International Cricket Council, although escaping a fine. In March 2010, when England played Bangladesh in Chittagong, the pitch is said to have been marked poor by Jeff Crowe but, by the time it had been through the ICC process, had been upgraded to satisfactory, the implication being that any sanctions against the ground would leave Bangladesh with Dhaka as their only venue if it were given a warning and transgressed again. A similar situation could arise here, given Pakistan’s reliance on Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Dubai, the site of Thursday’s second Test.
Flat and unresponsive the pitch may have been in the Sheikh Zayed Stadium but it required a phenomenal display of mental and physical strength and endurance to play the sorts of innings managed first by Shoaib Malik and then by Cook. The England captain played in adversity, however, after Pakistan had racked up a huge total. Unobtrusively, for hour upon hour, he kept England in the game, batting for longer than the entire Trent Bridge Ashes Test in August.
And after he was finally dismissed for 263, when it seemed as if he might bat for ever, he confessed to being a bit tired, and even to a “dab” of sweat: Malik, 197 minutes fewer for his 246, ended up on a saline drip.
Cook’s words are fascinating: “It’s just mind over matter,” he said, “and you get into this kind of blissful routine. It didn’t feel like 14 hours.”
Blissful. Time standing still. It certainly felt like 14 hours to those watching. This is cricket incorporating a total state of togetherness of body and mind, an oblivion from all distraction. This is zen. Zen and the Art of Batting.
