PAKISTAN TOUR OF AUSTRALIA, 2023-24

Nowhere to hide against Australia's attack quadrant

Pat Cummins worked over Babar Azam before Mitchell Marsh delivered the coup de grace.
Pat Cummins worked over Babar Azam before Mitchell Marsh delivered the coup de grace. ©AFP

What do you do when Pat Cummins is steaming in before landing every single ball on that Pat Cummins length and making batting look like the most unenviable job in the world. What do you do with Mitchell Starc is doing the same off his long run-up and getting a 75-over-old ball to snake back towards your stumps with menacing intentions at high speed.

What do you do when Josh Hazlewood, in particular, is doing the same, testing every intricate bit of your batting technique like a cerebral assassin with unrelenting precision.

Maybe you do what the Pakistani batters did for most parts of the third day's play in Perth. Summon all the courage and the skills you're blessed with and hope for the best. To the credit of the visitors, they did manage to still survive for over 100 overs against the highest quality of fast bowling you would ever imagine witnessing. That too on a Perth Stadium pitch that had begun to show its true colours, with cracks and indentations beginning to emerge at various spots on the surface. The fact that the Pakistani innings lasted only 11 overs fewer than the Australian first foray, but the home team still ended up with a lead of 216 runs, only amplifies the level of challenge that Shan Masood & Co had to endure on a day of high attrition on the western coast of Australia.

So remarkably potent were the Australian fast bowlers that you couldn't help but let your mind wander back to that incredible afternoon in Adelaide three summers ago when the hapless Indian batters weren't so fortunate. Hazlewood, especially, had tested every intricate bit of the Indian batters' technique on that occasion too. But somehow, unlike on Saturday (December 16), there were zero plays and misses at the Adelaide Oval. Only edges, snicks and regulation catches to the wicket-keeper and the slip cordon. Unlike with Imam-Ul-Haq, who showed a lot of grit and gumption over a 199-ball stay, and a bunch of the other Pakistani batters who were given multiple chances to survive with the ball avoiding bat repeatedly, there wasn't to be a single second chance for any of the Indian batters in December 19, 2020. If anything it put the collapse from the India into better perspective. It was an anomaly. It was a freak show.

What we witnessed in Perth over the course of two sessions, and a lot on Day 2 as well, was more a reminder of the amount of fortune required alongside courage and temperament to withstand the onslaught of one of the most successful pace triumvirates Test cricket has ever seen. How else do you explain how Hazlewood only had a solitary wicket to show for his brilliant performance with the ball. Or Cummins for that matter, despite having given Babar Azam the kind of working over you've rarely seen the world-class Pakistan batter have to deal with. Only to fall to Mitchell Marsh in his first over of the spell in a fashion that Cummins came close to snaring him with on multiple occasions.

But the thing with this Australian Test team is what comes after you've managed to see off Cummins, Hazlewood and Starc. Only the small matter of the best off-spinner the southern hemisphere has ever produced. Nathan Lyon over the last two days has proved why he is the most valuable member of this elite bowling attack. And how much he was missed during the Ashes after he left injured at Lord's in his 100th straight Test.

From the first delivery he turned square past Abdullah Shafique on Friday (December 15), Lyon had looked good to finish with a bagful of wickets. And like his bowling colleagues, he too didn't always have things go his way in spite of having found his rhythm and his verve from his very first over in the contest.

It did take his class however to finally get rid of Imam, who after having kept his nerve for 198 deliveries, decided to break free. He couldn't have done so at an inopportune time possible, with only minutes to go for the lunch-break, or against an inopportune delivery, a loopy off-break with a lot of dip from Lyon. Achieving nothing but getting stumped by Alex Carey and looking a tad foolish in the process. It was yet another illustration of just why facing and overcoming this Australian Test attack as a whole has to be among the most arduous tasks in modern-day cricket. As for Pakistan, it only gets more challenging from here. For, they have to do it all over again on a Perth pitch that will only continue to get more challenging, and against Cummins & Co who will only continue to get better.

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