ABU DHABI // First stop, memory lane. There was a period across 2012 and 2013 when Nasir Jamshed looked like the cat’s whiskers, with hundreds against India and a 90-something against Australia. He was a little chunky and limited but he had timing figured like the Swiss.
Towards the end of that year emerged Sohaib Maqsood, with this curious languid electricity, almost as if he was indifferent to the gifts he possessed. He made runs against South Africa first up, which is never to be taken lightly.
Then the next season came Harris Sohail and he looked a smart one. Not flashy, or explosive, but smart, like he knew how to pace an innings, or finish one off. Just before the 2015 World Cup he was exactly the kind of batsman Pakistan might need in a new middle order.
More from Pakistan v West Indies:
• Osman Samiuddin on Azhar Ali: Pity Pakistan's captain, who cannot seem to win no matter what he does
• Paul Radley: Generation Next shine in Sharjah as Pakistan continue to thrive in a post-Afridi world
• Paul Radley on Babar Azam: Azam leading Pakistan's youth brigade
Chuck in Fawad Alam, the reasons of whose exclusion nobody knows even now. And though people know the reasons behind the ousters of Ahmed Shehzad and Umar Akmal, nobody will forget what they could — and should — have been.
Why rake them up? Because for the next few months, maybe more, the same kind of giddiness that once swirled around these guys will swirl around Babar Azam.
On Wednesday evening at Sheikh Zayed stadium in Abu Dhabi, Azam completed an ODI hat-trick — three hundreds in three successive games. Nothing has ever looked as inevitable as this last one, from first ball — which he comfortably defended to leg — to his last, bowled trying to lap-sweep, or scoop, or whatever it may have been. At that stage, the boredom of not being challenged was what got him, not the bowling.
In the process he equalled or broke a host of records, none of which seem as important to note here as the actual doing of what he has been doing — that is, his batting. And it is impossible to not be taken in by a very obvious pedigree.
He is not easily rushed. He has the shots, a fact confirmed no more emphatically than by the six he hit over extra cover (and the boundaries are long here) off Sunil Narine. That was pure.
That was also his only maximum, which might seem a light return in a hundred, but he has his shots we know. Above everything, in this series at least, he has shown that he knows his way around an innings, the ins and outs of ticking off a run here or a double there. In the first ODI in Sharjah, 46 per cent of the balls he faced were dots. Since then he has brought that down, to 33 per cent in the second game and 30 per cent on Wednesday night.
There has been a real bloodlessness about him, maybe even selfishness. All batsmen are selfish, just to different degrees, but at various points in Azam’s three hundreds the sense has lingered that he has perhaps not gone as hard as he can.
It is not a fault, not yet anyway, and hardly so against opponents as out of it as West Indies. The 136-run win in Abu Dhabi sealed a second clean sweep for Pakistan on this tour and it is impossible to imagine that the three Tests will not bring a third clean sweep.
Azam has looked a real batsman, as much as any from Pakistan recently. That is just it though — those names above also looked, for brief moments, like real, proper batsmen. They are not around anymore, which should not be lost amid the bright glow of Azam’s arrival.
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