The atmosphere is rarified on the summit and England are having trouble breathing. A second successive defeat for the first time in three and a half years, and victory for Pakistan in the series means that already they have started their descent towards more comfortable regions. Much earlier in the day a rejuvenated Australia was completing its annihilation of India that matched England's of last summer and are heading upwards. The order, as Bob Dylan said, is rapidly changing.
This is not good for England. Their place at the top, and the time spent in absorbing it as the year came to an end, was always going to be threatened by a most challenging schedule that in the space of 12 months would include a home series against the second-placed team South Africa, but also a trio of series in those parts of the world they find the most fraught. Hardly will they have been back from the Middle East than they will be off to Sri Lanka, where awaits more trial by spin, although a Murali-less team poses less of a threat than the threesome who have bowled Pakistan to their wins. Quite where India lie in the scheme of things will be harder to assess. They do not have a series until England in the autumn by which time, despite protestations to the contrary by the Indian board, the order is sure to have changed there too. It would be hard to argue as it stands that Misbah-ul-Haq is not leading, with distinction, the premier side from the subcontinental region.
The joy this will bring to the supporters of Pakistan cricket will be untold. Many of those Pakistani migrant workers who attended and enlivened the match after prayers on Friday were back at their jobs, but there was still a passionate hard core, representing countrymen and women for whom circumstance has deprived them of the opportunity to see their team on the cricket grounds at home. Their game has been riven by scandal, the country disrupted by terrorism. The cricketers are, in effect, migrant workers themselves. Perhaps the manner in which Misbah and the coach, Mohsin Khan, have got the players, all of them, to dedicate themselves once more to cricket and cricket alone merely serves to highlight the iniquities that preceded when a reputation as mavericks served as convenient camouflage for wrong doing. In beating England twice, and so emphatically, they deserve every credit.
England will insist that this is a team game and that they take bouquets and brickbats as a unit. But it is blindingly obvious where lies the blame. England have been bowled out for 192, 160, 327 and 72; 34 of the wickets have gone to three spinners, of which 23 have involved no one else but the bowler. Playing spin has long been the achilles heel of England batting, something exacerbated by the revival in wrist spin by Abdul Qadir, Shane Warne, Anil Kumble and Mushtaq Ahmed; the development of alternative deliveries by the finger spinners (or more precisely reverse-wrist spinners); and, crucially, the increased use of tracking technology that has persuaded umpires that the sort of lbw decisions that hitherto were taboo are now considered acceptable and backed up as such by the Umpire Decision Review System.
For the foreseeable future, it will be down to the batsmen themselves to work out a method of playing them, starting in the third Test back in Dubai on Friday. Changes were evident in some in this match, most notably Andrew Strauss, who for much of his innings stayed on the back foot and scored in his habitual areas square. Others, such as Kevin Pietersen, strive to use their height and get forward, knowing that the pace at which Abdur Rehman and Saeed Ajmal can bowl can catch batsmen all too readily on the back foot. Essentially, though, where pad play was once an integral part of technique against spin, the ball has to be played with the bat.
It will be hard to teach old dogs new tricks, though, for much of the technique, so evident in the best players of the subcontinent, is learned in the formative years against tuppence-a-dozen spinners on the sort of pitches that England batsmen, or those hard-handed players brought up in the southern hemisphere, rarely experience. Once, soft-hand techniques and back-foot play were developed on uncovered pitches. Now it is the young batsmen who have to be tutored, a deal of their development spent at centres of excellence in India, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. A fear, though, is that the delicacies of this art will be lost in the pursuit of 60-ball hundreds and big shots.
Against this, England's bowlers have been blameless, heroic even, scarcely given a chance by their batting confrères. In this match, Stuart Broad and Jimmy Anderson have given nothing, their line and length consistently impeccable, while Monty Panesar has made a triumphant return to Test cricket by outbowling Graeme Swann. That he is a more mature bowler now is obvious: by his demeanour through to the way he contributes to setting his own fields. As well as the new, there is still much of the old Monty to love: a lurking haplessness that hides behind his enthusiasm in the field; his ability to look like a genuine batsman until he misses one for no apparent reason. But he bowled with fizz and joie de vivre. And gone is the coltish gambolling celebratory trot of old. Now, his two-footed jump of joy is pure Pete Townshend.
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