How Pakistan Won the One Day Series Against Australia

Everything was going well at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) for Pakistan with 63 runs on the board for two wickets and with Babar Azam (on 37) seeming to have found his form in this first One Day International (ODI). Then Adam Zampa came in and bowled a ball that looked straightforward but kept far too low for Babar to defend it. He was out, leaving a forlorn Mohammed Rizwan – Pakistan’s captain – at the non-striker’s end. Mitchell Starc, with his formidable bounce, had taken the openers and now the Pakistani batting line-up seemed ready to crumble.

It was the bowlers – in particular Naseem Shah with four 6s to get to 40 – that assembled a decent total of 203. If Starc and Pat Cummins found the pitch to be helpful to them, the same quickly became apparent for Shaheen Shah Afridi and Naseem Shah. But then, Steve Smith, with his unorthodox style, was joined by Josh Inglis, and they seemed to take the game away from Pakistan.

Australia at home is always hard to beat because the pitches are so well tuned for their quicks. But just when it seemed as if Australia was going to sail to victory, Haris Rauf took out Smith, Marnus Labuschagne, and Glenn Maxwell.

Haris Rauf comes from Rawalpindi, the military capital of Pakistan. His working-class parents, father a welder in the Public Works Department, raised him with all the good traditions of the Pashtun Swati community. Interested in football as a young man, Rauf began to play tape-ball cricket to supplement his family’s modest income (tape-ball cricket is played with a tennis ball covered with electrical tape).

In 2016, the Lahore Qalandars, which plays in the Pakistan Super League, began the Player Development Programme to scout for young players. Rauf, and two of his friends, travelled to Lahore in 2017, arriving late, for the trails. They joined thousands of young boys who came to test themselves against each other. The selectors marvelled at Rauf’s natural speed, which came despite the lack of training and the lack of muscle on his working-class body.

Rauf was already twenty-four, which in the world of fast bowlers is almost mid-career (Starc, for instance, was in the Australian national team at the age of twenty). Rauf is fast, but what characterises him is his consistency in line and length. He frustrates the best batsmen, forcing them to make errors against his straight ball. This is what rattled the Australians in the three-match series this year.

Australia won the first ODI thanks to stubborn batting from captain Cummins and his fellow seamer Starc. But this was a close game, even if it did not seem so on the scoreboard. At the second ODI in Adelaide Oval, the Pakistani seamers harassed the Australian batsmen from the first ball onwards, with Afridi dispatching the openers by the start of the seventh over. And then came Rauf, who took the next five wickets with super-fast deliveries, four of them resulting from nicks to Mohammed Rizwan behind the stumps. By the end of Australia’s innings, Rauf had figures of 8 for 96 in the first two matches. Pakistan’s betting in this second match ended when Babar heaved Zampa for six, a fitting reply to how Zampa got Babar in the first match.

Glenn Maxwell, who is one of the most dangerous batsmen in the Australian side, was undone by Haris Rauf in all three innings (his scores: 0, 16, and 0). Rauf’s burst of speed came alongside very accurate fast bowling with a host of short balls from Afridi and Mohammed Hasnain. Hasnain, like Rauf, comes from a modest family, his father an owner of a small cattle feed shop in Hirabad.

One of Hasnain’s fast and short deliveries sent Cooper Connolly back to the pavilion hurt. The accuracy of these Pakistani working-class quickies ensured that no Australian batsman made a fifty in the series. Pakistan won the series 2-1, the first such ODI series win since 2017.

Cricket has a reputation for being a game of elites, a leisurely game that spreads over many days. In the subcontinent, however, cricket is a game of narrow lanes and overcrowded fields, a game of a few hours rather than several days. It is not the match that counts but each ball, the need to get the ball right for the bowler and the need to select the correct stroke for the batsmen.

Skill and joy are the anchor of the game, not scorekeeping. Boys such as Rauf and Hasnain are the gully cricketers, working-class youth who play for fun or for money, but play above all to become legends on their streets. Their cricket is a working-class sport, the ball bouncing too high for the batsmen, the batsmen playing unorthodox shots to deal with the uneven bounce. These are boys who are made for the urgency of the T20 or the ODI game, playing for this format long before they became institutionalised.

(Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and chief correspondent for Globetrotter)