da premier bet： With the pressure “coming from all corners” and his side 57 for 5, Sarfraz Ahmed produced the sort of punchy innings that used to be his trademark

da dobrowin： Osman Samiuddin in Abu Dhabi16-Oct-2018Sarfraz Ahmed hit seven fours, no sixes, played 129 balls, batted 195 minutes and gave zero craps in his innings of 94. That last stat is, you’ve guessed it, the most important one.See, Sarfraz Ahmed has not been a happy man. During the Asia Cup he admitted to having sleepless nights. His team weren’t winning. First they were not winning against India. Then they were not winning against Bangladesh. Then they didn’t win against Australia, Australia side which shakes your hands and probably says hello to your parents and also isn’t as good as even the 2014 side that was swept aside here.There were no runs. There were missed chances. There were reviews that should’ve been taken that weren’t. There were reviews that shouldn’t have been taken that were. There were frazzled captaincy decisions. In between the first Test and this there was a little smoke that turned into a bigger fire, a divergence in tactics with Mickey Arthur that became a dukes-out dispute between captain and coach.Brooding might be the word to describe him best over these last few weeks. He has walked around head down in practice, has bristled at press conferences where every third question has been about his captaincy, or batting, or his relationship with Arthur. Brooding is not a term that can have been used to describe him too often. He is cherubic. Chirpy. Hyper. Combative.Publicly at least he comes across as one of those guys who doesn’t invite deeper scrutiny into what might be beneath that exterior because, you suspect, there isn’t that much worth scrutinising. Not in a bad way mind, just in the way that some people are uncomplicated and no worse off for it.Sarfraz interviews as a rule, for example, will not end up in the canon of great cricket conversations. Once, in the company of a few journalists, Sarfraz spent the best part of a night talking in some detail about the cows he had been rearing for over a year for . He knows the game, no doubt, and lives for it. There’s an innovative strain in his thinking too. He’s just not the greatest expresser of it all.But brooding? Hold that pose for a bit please. There’s an ocean of emotion and context and circumstance brewing beneath that. We understand innings in all kinds of different ways, more than ever before. And there was such a Sarfraz stat in this one, from CricViz, that at one point, it was the longest innings of the year to not include a single leave. ‘Why leave when you can score a run off it instead’ isn’t but should be the bumper sticker on Sarfraz’s car.This 94 was best understood in terms of mood though; a brooding innings, as if Sarfraz was affronted by his own failures, fuelled by whatever slights and barbs he has chosen to pick from the last month, or just having to grapple with the burdens of three roles in three formats.

Yeah the pressure was there, definitely. A lot of it, coming from all corners… So there has been a bit of reliefSarfraz Ahmed

Here for sure there was some glimpse of a deeper Sarfraz at play and something beyond just the stereotype of him as a Karachi street-smart who operates best under crisis. Because this was more than just the crisis of 57 for 5 on the first morning of a Test where you’ve won the toss and the average first-innings score over the last ten Tests is 402.Superficially, if you just went by what you saw in isolation, this was Sarfraz batting once again as he did in 2014. Until very recently, that peak did not seem as distant as it has done this year, when it has suddenly seemed to belong to a different decade. This was just a second fifty in 11 innings but the thing about Sarfraz’s batting used to be that in between the landmarks there’d be innings lesser in value but equal in import. In this little run that hasn’t been the case.Especially in that bracing counter post-lunch though, this was 2014 Sarfraz where he just went with his strengths. Move around the crease, up, down and sideways; target spinners over midwicket; show your stumps and target point; trust those hands to reach out past off-stump; trust the eyes to time it. Bat as if you are floating.His manner didn’t match the sprightliness of what he was doing though. Mostly he walked around head down, trying not to let the outside in. He is one of life’s great on-field chatterers and yet today communication with his on-field partner was at a bare minimum. He clapped a sharp run once maybe whereas generally he’s of the Younis Khan school of run-appreciation (which is to clap every run, leisurely, risky or standard). A fist-bump was spotted. The acknowledgement of the fifty was cursory.And that as much he admitted, it wasn’t just 57 for 5 stoking the fires underneath him. From up above the sky was bearing down on him.”Yeah the pressure was there, definitely,” he chuckled later, more in relief than in nervousness. “A lot of it. You know it’s coming from all corners. Somebody is saying leave Test cricket, somebody is saying leave captaincy, some are saying leave him out of the team, some are saying Karachi guys are supporting him, some are saying Lahore guys are going at him.”When all this happens, you know there is a lot of pressure and it just comes from everywhere, not just one corner but all corners. So there has been a bit of relief and then to do it in a situation where you were 57 for 5 and in a really bad way.”In that sense, he said, it was as much pressure as he had faced when he got into the side in the 2015 World Cup against South Africa, as an opener. The public had gone crazy wanting him there, in place of Umar Akmal, but the management didn’t think much of him. He came out against Dale Steyn, on a fresh pitch, nervous and inspired, scored an inventive 49 and helped Pakistan to an upset win.In both situations, at his lowest ebbs, he located and trusted an urge deep inside himself, which is, perhaps, exactly what he hasn’t been doing for a while now. In moments of extreme pressure he has erred too often on the side of caution, giving a crap about too many things, whereas the truth might be that in those moments he is better off, as he was today, going the other way.