Imagine you are 21 years old. You have played eight first-class matches in your life. You did not even have a passport a week ago. Then you land in England. Your first over averages 89.7mph. Every single delivery of that over is quicker than every other ball any Pakistan bowler has sent down on this entire tour. You trap the greatest Test batter England has produced before you have conceded a single run in Test cricket. You finish with four wickets. Then you come back with the bat, score 81 from the bottom of the order in a day, and end up as the second-highest run scorer of the side. You break the record for the most sixes by a debutant in Test history. And you play an innings that wakes up an entire ground, and an entire country, in the space of a couple of hours. That is where you tell the world that Pakistan has never had a shortage of talent. Only a shortage of people willing to look for it. What a story. What an absolute beauty of a Test cricket session.

So Pakistan will trade green for pink against England at the Gaddafi Stadium on Sunday, all for breast cancer awareness. Surprisingly, this green and pink combination could look absolutely stunning. I hope this becomes a tradition, with the home side in every tri-series turning out in pink.

Incredible

Salman Ali Agha is the only player in this Pakistan side who adapts to the situation. If Babar and fakhar are two players that are considered permanent in this odi team, regardless of their performance in other formats agha should be third. Zero complaints from him in the fifty-over format. This is his format and he owns it. There is not enough wattage in the country to measure the electricity of that innings today. Clutch and cool, the way he always is. He is Pakistan's highest run-scorer in ODIs since 2023. He has chased the biggest totals this team has ever chased. Just an ideal cricketer in this format.

Good debut inning by this 19 years old. I might be exaggerating but regardless of whether he performs in this series, he should already be our first-choice keeper in the longer formats. I'll explain why. Last season he scored a thousand runs in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, took 32 dismissals in ten matches, and was named both Player of the Tournament and Best Wicketkeeper while Karachi Blues won the title. A wicketkeeper winning Player of the Tournament in a first-class competition is really interesting. First-class, 42.81 with four hundreds and a best of 154. List A, 34.77. T20, 21.28. The longer you give him, the better he gets. His maiden first-class hundred was 154, and then he came back out and made 65 not out in the same match. And he has been carrying teams since he was a child. He played for Pakistan Under-19 weeks after turning 16, captained them at the 2023 Asia Cup, and captained them at the 2024 Under-19 World Cup. Ghazi Ghori is fine and I want to be fair to him. First-class average of 39.81, three hundreds, a proper record. But across 21 List A matches he averages 24.64, and that is the number that tells you where he fits. As a backup, no complaints at all. Baig averages nearly three more than him in red-ball cricket and he is four years younger. He was picked ahead of Ghori today. Now leave him there.

I really hope Saim Ayub performs in ODIs. ODI cricket was his format and will always be his format. t. And if he does not come good, then the question we should be asking is why we dragged him into T20 cricket and kept playing him there, and kept playing him there, and kept playing him there. He played 17 ODIs and scored three hundreds in them. He has played 67 T20Is and scored none. He averages 46.93 in ODIs and 21.27 in T20Is. Pakistan have picked him in the shorter format four times as often. So I hope he performs this week, and I hope he gets his touch back, because he is far too important to Pakistan for this to end as a cautionary tale.

The lowest Test bowling average across any 30 consecutive innings among active bowlers (all under 17): 1. Jasprit Bumrah (14.80) 2. Josh Hazlewood (15.06) 3. Jason Holder (16.63) Bumrah and Hazlewood surprise nobody, but man, I miss Jason Holder in Test cricket. At his peak, he was a genuine two-in-one cricketer, batting like a top-six player and bowling like a strike weapon.

Mohammad Hafeez was a weird sportsman. There were literally seven to eight versions. Then those were associated with times before and after every single comeback. So Hafeez was not even a consistent character within his own career. So which version of him you liked most? Hafeez with a glowing face, snatching looks as the most intense person after a composed outing. Hafeez leaping with joy after catching a stunner at point. Or ever-present Mohammad Hafeez dismantling the leftie with his off-break. Personally, I liked Mohammad Hafeez presenting the elegance of the full face of his bat, driving through the off side. This was like an aroma that had the power to double my joy in the space of five seconds. The other version of Mohammad Hafeez that I cherished is with him always playing with unwavering passion for the game. Presenting Pakistan with honour, it's easier to say, Mohammad Hafeez proved through standing always with righteousness. The amount of talent, however, in Mohammad Hafeez was hard to quantify despite his underachieved resume. But Hafeez meant: giving the team plenty of dimensions: he will bat ferociously at the top of the order, but he will switch to defensive mode if required. His wisdom knows when it's time for the life within to switch from gills to lungs. He doesn't flight his off-breaks much, but he'll provide immaculate control over line and length, and he'll allow the captain to use him at almost any stage of an innings. Weird cricketer but we loved him, maybe not wholly but a part of us did. In some deep valley of our mind, he surely has a place. Happy birthday professor

Grandpa still got it. Brendan Taylor has just gone past Andy Flower to become Zimbabwe's highest ODI run-scorer of all time. Last month he passed Sachin Tendulkar as the longest-serving player in the history of men's one-day cricket, 22 years and four months to Tendulkar's 22 years and three. Three and a half of those years he spent banned. He is 40 and he'll play WC 2027. He has 11 ODI centuries, which no Zimbabwean has ever matched. He is their leading run-scorer. He outlasted Tendulkar with three and a half years cut out of the middle of him. And he is going to be at the 2027 World Cup. You know what I mean? That is going to be something, man. Imagine Taylor walking out at a World Cup at 41 years old. Forty-one. Cricket really does write some beautiful stories.

A fifty off 14 balls. Then a hundred today. But Nobody is hyping Jake Fraser-McGurk any more. That is the strange part. He has spent this week batting like the most talented kid in Australia and the noise around him is gone, and I still cannot work out whether this bloke is good or garbage. What happened to this kid? You know him from the IPL, from when the hype sat at a level almost nobody in Australian cricket ever gets handed. Then he disappeared. Not in one go either, which is what I keep turning over. The fall was somehow sudden and gradual at the same time, and I cannot work out why it happened at all. Because he could have been the best batting talent in Australia right now. The raw skill is insane. But either he has been reluctant to improve, or his coaches have been unable to fix his technique, and I honestly do not know which of those two it is. Between them, the talent is going to waste. He is your classic hitter without the technique to back it up. One game in ten the slashing comes off and he looks like the best young batter on earth. The other nine he flops. Raw skill on its own has never carried anybody far. He has to work out what actually works for him.

So Steve Smith has just joined the list of batsmen who have scored over 5,000 runs in away conditions in Tests. Now, interestingly, in this list the man who tops it is still Sachin Tendulkar. At the same time, the men who top the average list are Sachin, Border, Steve Waugh and Sangakkara. Sachin had a slightly lower average than Border and Waugh, but he played far more away Tests than either of them, and he also scored 29 away Test hundreds. What a player! Sachin was unbelievable. Also, Sachin's away average was 56.95 after 177 Tests, 14,692 runs at that point. At that stage he averaged 58-plus in Australia and 62 in England. His last 23 Tests brought that average down, unfortunately.

Jayden Seales says that mid-spell, in the middle of an over, he hears his bowling coach's voice saying the same four words. "Don't try anything. Do not try anything." That is Ravi Rampaul's coaching method, and since he took over as West Indies bowling coach the bowling unit looks really good. The man turns 42 today. Although I remember him for his bowling and his variations, here I just want to discuss his coaching. Most young fast bowlers on earth are being handed five variations and told to find a mystery ball. Rampaul does the opposite. He takes things away. Seales says the instruction is always to keep it simple for a lot longer, and that it has only recently started to stick. He is not teaching tricks. He is not teaching a slower ball nobody can read. He is teaching a bowler to stop trying to be interesting. Which is why, when India chased 405 off his attack in Guwahati on 1 October, he did not blame the surface. He blamed execution. Of course he did. Execution is the only thing he coaches. He has had the job seventeen months. His very first assignment was a tour of Ireland, which is funny, because in 2008 Ravi Rampaul was Ireland's hired overseas pro. He went back as the man telling a Test nation how to bowl. Happy birthday, Ravi.

Pakistan did not hand Saeed Ajmal a Test debut until he was 31 years and 263 days old. For context, By that age Shane Warne was closing in on 400 Test wickets and Muttiah Muralitharan was closing in on 500. And then Ajmal was allowed just four years. Yet in those four years he built a statistical dominance that screamed across the globe, taking 178 Test wickets in 35 matches. More than five a game. Warne never managed that across 145 matches, and Murali only bettered it across 133. Overall he finished with 447 international wickets in 212 matches. Happy 49th birthday man Science is the man, and the man had a peak. In 2011 he took 50 Test wickets in eight matches and finished the year as the leading Test wicket-taker in the world. On 24 November he became the No.1 ranked ODI bowler on the planet. He was 34 years old, and he had been a Test cricketer for two years. Then England. January 2012, Andrew Strauss brings the No.1 ranked Test side in the world to the UAE, with a batting order sold to everybody as the best players of spin in the game. Ten for 97 in Dubai, including a career-best 7 for 55. Twenty-four wickets for the series at 14.70. England lose 3-0. And he was not even turning it square. Line, flight, half a yard of arm speed, and an economy under 2.6 against batters picked specifically to handle exactly that. They gave him a quarter of a career. He made sure nobody forgot his name, and plenty still have not. Faf du Plessis called him the toughest bowler he ever bowled to. Gautam Gambhir said the same. What a peak the man had. happy birthday man

Aiden Markram is the one batter you can want dropped and call great in the same week. Look at his career and you wonder, what the hell is this guy? It just doesn't add up. Someday, he'll make you question everything by failing consistently. And then, on another day, he'll play the kind of knock that'll bring you to your knees, screaming that this is greatness. But regardless of whatever you might assume, there's not the faintest doubt about Markram's prowess and ceiling. There are a few players who, when you watch them play, make you forget all the stats and the background. You just admit that this guy can bat. They create this mesmerising trap for you, and it also leaves a lot of material for psychologists. Aiden Markram is one of them. When he bats, and importantly bats well, he looks so composed and calculated that he appears to be a chess grandmaster whose opponent had resigned. But the way he'd arranged his pieces had already set the result in motion the previous day. And then there are his drives. The man has an uncanny ability to execute the perfect drive, even on the most unforgiving surfaces. When he drives the ball, and he drives most often, even at 2am, the universe stops moving. Drive after drive after drive. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who can match his mastery with the drive. It's his signature move.

Imagine being so good at one thing that they name it after you. Cricketers have been scooping the ball over the wicketkeeper's head since 1868. Tillakaratne Dilshan did not invent it, and yet he is still the only man whose name stayed on it. Dilscoop. He turns 50 today. Johnny Mullagh was dropping to one knee and lifting fast bowlers over the keeper on the 1868 tour of England. Brian Langford played it for Somerset in 1962 and nobody noticed, because he batted too low for anyone to be watching. Then Dougie Marillier flicked Glenn McGrath over his shoulder twice in Australia in 2001, and for most of a decade the shot was called the Marillier. So what did Dilshan actually do differently? He moved it a few inches. Marillier and everyone before him helped the ball round the corner to fine leg. Dilshan took it off his nose line and sent it straight back over the keeper's head, into the one part of a cricket field that nobody in 141 years had thought to defend, because no sane person hits it there. And then he did it for a month. The shot turned up in the IPL in April 2009 and arrived properly in England that June, where he opened the batting and scored 317 runs at a strike rate of 144.74, hitting 46 fours and three sixes, more boundaries than any other player in the tournament. Captains were inventing fielding positions in the middle of games. He was 32 when Sri Lanka moved him up to open, an age when batters get managed towards the exit. Almost 12,000 of his 17,671 international runs came after that, and so did every Test and T20I hundred he made. I still remember the Aussie commentators losing it. "Oh, the ramp, and that has gone miles." Happy 50th, Dilly.

It would be hypocritical if we criticise Saim, Shadab and all the others and don't say a word about Fakhar Zaman. He might be a big-match player, but he has played 120 T20I matches. He's averaging just 23.98, with a strike rate of 132, and he has not scored a single hundred in any of them. He's 36 years old, and 2027 is likely to be his last World Cup. So I guess dragging him through a format like that could also affect his ODI performance. He's our ODI performer and we've got to keep him there. just don't drag him in t20is for now.

It is slightly a disadvantage that Jasprit Bumrah is the competitor of Josh Hazlewood, otherwise the best all-format bowler would not even have been a debate. The only difference is that Bumrah is blessed with a gifted action, and Hazlewood does it in a more economical, front-on way. Less threatening, almost the same impact. A true successor of McGrath, but in all formats. This man is a freak of nature. His T20 international average is better than his Test average. He is delivering wickets in South Africa and against Bangladesh, and at the same time he was awesome in the IPL and in whatever ODI cricket he is playing. For a man who has been a victim of injuries and is still a proper workhorse, it is nothing short of amazing. What a cricketer.

In February 2020 Queensland dropped Matt Renshaw. He was left out of his own state's Sheffield Shield squad, and the reason was that he had gone 31 first-class innings without a century. He was averaging 20 that season and 22 the one before. He was 23 years old and had struggled to find his way back to the national side since the 2018 UAE tour. This week he told everyone he doesn't give up. he ensured everyone that his method is the second thing to notice about him. The first is that he does not give up. So is that mentality, or is it just a man finally finding form? Mentality, I think. This Matt Renshaw is mentally a monster, and I am absolutely certain of it. Imagine being exiled from the team for years, resurfacing, batting at a number nobody picked him for, against a hostile attack, and then outscoring every teammate in both innings. some mentality Keep going, Matt.

Loved hearing Vernon Philander reminiscing about his era and the men who bowled alongside him. Personally it transports me back to that period, and to what a monstrous attack it was. Steyn, Ntini, Morkel, Philander. (although they paired differently) Steyn with the most lethal outswinger the game has ever manufactured, and he was catastrophic on flat tracks. Morkel with that towering frame, extracting bounce out of nothing. Philander murderous on that wicket-to-wicket line with that scrambled seam. And Ntini, well, what can anybody say about so volcanic a character. Jansen, Rabada and Nortje might constitute a superior trio, but my word, that lot was something else entirely.

greatest slip fielder of this generation.