BENGALURU: After their comfortable win over Bangladesh, many Pakistan fans on social media dug up a much-mocked phrase that Saqlain Mushtaq used a few years ago to refer to his team’s up-and-down form.
‘Qudrat ka Nizam’, the laws of nature in English, was originally intended by Saqlain as an allegory for how good times follow the bad. Here though, the meaning was a bit different. The chance of rain in Bengaluru on November 9 when New Zealand would take on Sri Lanka was a whopping 70 percent. If a win for Pakistan against the Kiwis was followed by a washout of that game, it would greatly brighten the former’s chances of an improbable come-back-from-the-dead entry into the semifinals.
But then, the laws of nature work in mysterious ways. On Friday evening, as the Kiwis were halfway through their practice session on the eve of their match against Pakistan, the skies over the Chinnaswamy Stadium darkened, let out an almighty rumble and started pouring down upon the Garden City. More rain is forecast on Saturday when arguably the most important match of the Cricket World Cup so far is scheduled to be played.
It is not like the fixture needed the threat of a washout to make it anymore dramatic. On one hand, you have Pakistan doing the perfect imitation of a Pakistan team — go into the tournament as favourites, put in a couple of underwhelming performances that will cause all to abandon hope, then come back with a result that will leave them with a sliver to hold on to, then suddenly burn bright, peak at the right time and stun the rest of the world into silence. That was how they won the Cup in 1992. Babar Azam’s men are on step three of four.
Against Bangladesh, suddenly everything magically fell into place. Shaheen Shah Afridi looked every bit the menacing opening ball bowler he is supposed to be, and was ably backed up by Mohammed Wasim Jr and Haris Rauf. Then, Fakhar Zaman came back from the sidelines and displayed the sort of aggressiveness that had been the hallmark of Pakistani openers in the past but had rarely been displayed in this tournament.
“Yeah, everybody tells me it's the classic World Cup campaign,” Pakistan team director Mickey Arthur said on Friday. “And I hate that, because I'd rather that we were cruising now and things had been really good, it would certainly be a lot less stressful. But again, we got ourselves into a position before the Bangladesh game where it was kind of out of our hands and it's come back in a funny way into our hands again because albeit we've got to win and win big in both our games, it's still in our control, which it wasn't before the Bangladesh game. We had obviously a really good result there. And then South Africa did us a little bit of a favour as well. So, it's kind of pushed it back into our hands, albeit a long shot.”
On the other hand, you had New Zealand in the middle of what was formerly known as ‘doing a South Africa’, but is now in danger of being rechristened as ‘doing a New Zealand’. Look like one of the better teams of the tournament for a good spell, then throw it all down the drain by choking in the most important matches. A loss on Saturday will not knock them out but will cause the kind of dent in confidence that a lot of teams never recover from.
Of course, things have not exactly gone their way off the pitch either. A string of injuries have plagued their campaign so far, Pacer Matt Henry was the latest in the list and unlike Kane Williamson, Lockie Ferguson and Mark Chapman, his injury was severe enough to rule him out of the tournament. In their previous game, against South Africa, the Kiwis had no reserve fielders left after Ish Sodhi replaced Henry. A member of the coaching staff would have had to take to the field had one more player needed to leave the field.
“One thing we do as Kiwis is we stay pretty grounded,” said Daryl Mitchell on Friday. “We stay where our feet are, and injuries are things that we can't control. All I know is that the 11 guys that will take the field tomorrow will be very proud to represent our country and get stuck in a World Cup.”
And all eleven of those guys will need to stand up and be counted if the Black Caps are going to get what they want on Saturday. Unless of course, ‘Qudrat ka Nizam’ has a say.
