Misbah’s Pakistan proves they are more than meets the eye as they pull rank with England

Pakistan captain Misbah-ul-Haq leads his team on a lap of honour after winning the 4th Investec Test between England and Pakistan at The Kia Oval on August 14, 2016 in London, England. (Getty)

They ended with three bowlers, the fourth having breezed in for four overs and a bit before being sent off, but deciding that he would change the day.

You have probably already forgotten the name of the guy who took England’s last wicket yesterday and took the excellent catch that started things off in England’s second innings on Saturday but also played the shot that almost scuppered Pakistan’s first innings.

He may never play a Test again so that, essentially, Pakistan can be said to have been playing this Test, one they needed to win, with 10 men, in which they dropped a centurion when he was on nine and dismissed another off a no-ball who then went to make a momentum-shifting 55.

So you could look at this as old Pakistan up to their usual tricks, winning despite themselves and all that malarkey, and more so because it was a left-arm paceman and a legspinner that did it here.

You would not be wrong but you would not be completely right. But just as resoundingly, in big and small ways, this is a new Pakistan, or more accurately, this is Misbah-ul-Haq’s Pakistan. What you see on the surface is what you get but you get a lot more than what you necessarily see.

Accordingly, this is a side that has felt like it may be unravelling whenever it has been at its most attacking, but attacking in the conventional sense – funky fields, higher run-rates, fierce, stumps-driven fast bowling.

When they are most in control, and thus dangerous, is when they are scripting longer drawn passages of more nuanced strategy – an inverted attack. Dry up runs for a batsman, wear down strike bowlers. People go doolally when Misbah puts men on the boundary with the opposition wickets down, but he is denying modern batsmen their oxygen. You can choke a man or bludgeon him but in the end what you are doing is the same thing.

It is in getting every single one of his players to think and play to that tone – and some of Mohammed Amir’s dry, restrictive spells in this series are the best example – that this is most clearly Misbah’s side.

But something else sets this side apart, especially from Pakistan sides this century. Apologies, as this is a resort to sporting cliche but some of them are true.

There is a sturdier core to this team, one that as this summer has shown, does not combust as soon as the temperature rises. This is not hokum. Ask yourself how any other Pakistan side in recent memory would have responded after the kind of shellacking they received at Old Trafford?

Ask yourself how old Pakistan would have returned after the traumatic nature of their defeat in Edgbaston. You know exactly how.

Yet twice Pakistan picked themselves up, once after Old Trafford to boss large portions of Edgbaston and then again after that – a crushing defeat heaped upon a shattering one is usually despair squared.

The clue, was in Misbah’s news conference after Edgbaston. He was serene and rational, as he always is, but instead of veering towards brooding, he seemed light of heart and mind. Maybe it is overreaching, but never more did it seem he knew and trusted that core.

The rest of us know he had it. We know Younis Khan had it, and as an aside, this senior pair, with their strange chemistry, takes its place among Pakistan’s other, seminal great senior pairings, whether it is Imran-Javed or Kardar-Fazal.

Those who have watched Pakistan in the UAE strongly suspected that Azhar Ali, Asad Shafiq, Sarfraz Ahmed and others also had it, just that it had not been tested often enough in unfamiliar environs.

For those three to have had such a say in this series is Pakistan’s greatest gain.

But this is Pakistan and even Misbah’s Pakistan cannot deny that age-old weakness for creating great, romantic cricketing moments, moments that sweep through like waves to the rest of the cricket world.

So it had to be that this Oval win came on the 69th anniversary of the founding of Pakistan and that it came days after, as if in tribute to, the passing of Hanif Mohammed, one of the members of the grandest of all Oval triumphs, in 1954.

To find the right performance for the mood, to create a mood itself, and to make it happen as if it was simply meant to be – that will always and forever be Pakistan, whether the ranking says they are top or bottom.

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