England v Pakistan 4th Test, Day 3: Final Test Syndrome Strikes Again

 

England v Pakistan

4^th Test, Day 3

Final Test Syndrome Strikes Again

August 14^th  2016

Some time on Day 4 Pakistan will win this Test and continue England’s bizarre run of failing to win final Tests. This has cost them time and time again: series wins became shared series and narrow series defeats have turned into heavy ones. This time it will cost England the chance to become #1 in the ICC Test table, but the points lost over the last three years through lost Final Tests are so many that England would have been runaway leaders in the table now if each of those defeats had been a draw instead.

It has been a wonderful series of twists and turns. A shared series is probably no less than Pakistan deserve.

Previous series going back as long as I can remember – and that goes back to series in the 1970s – have often been bad-tempered. The rights and wrongs of the different incidents are now lost in the mists of time, but they have summed over the years to produce a bad blood that has almost invariably been carried-over to the next series. Some incidents were seemingly trivial at the time: the bat-pad catch that David Constant turned down, the five penalty runs for ball tampering, but exploded when the players reached the dressing-room and thought about what had happened. Others were seemingly down mainly to cultural and linguistic difficulties, but had no place on a cricket field at all. No England captain should abuse an umpire; however, to have done something that was perfectly legitimate within the laws and to be called a cheat, by the umpire of all people, in a series where the umpiring was a little erratic, to put it kindly, was a fairly substantial and unnecessary provocation – what is worse, neither player nor umpire were sanctioned!

Pakistani players have often felt slighted in the past and, in hindsight, with good reason. When you develop a new method of bowling – reverse swing in this case – that no one understands, or can cope with, the temptation to cry foul is huge, but the consequences dire when you cannot demonstrate foul play and the bowlers know that they have done nothing wrong. You then go for the return series determined to get some of your own back, pushing the limits of fair play in a sense of righteous indignation and the cycle goes on.

Misbah-ul-Haq has managed to break with the cycle. Although there have been some wobbles – the Alex Hales dismissal in the first innings did stress things a little – the spirit has been good. Neutral umpires and DRS ensure that neither side can feel credibly that the umpiring has been biased one way or the other and when an injustice is done, it can usually be rectified. No system is perfect and no system can ever be made perfect [sorry, if you do not want DRS until it is perfect, you will never get it], but DRS massively reduces the uncertainties.

Much is made of the ways that DRS can be spoofed, or is terribly unreliable. You can make a lot of the fact that the DRS system that you are using was not made by you, or in your country and thus must be biased against you. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to think of ways to reduce the heat signal from an edge for HotSpot, or the acoustic signal for Snicko, but that same edge that you are hiding, will save you from being given LBW: by trying to avoid being given out caught when you edged, you are increasing your chances of being given out LBW when that same edge will fail to be detected (think “bat-pad” chances, or LBWs with bat and pad close together) – in other words, your net gain is likely to be small. DRS giveth and DRS taketh away! And if the umpires are allowed to inspect the bat as they inspect the ball, even such options for cheating the system will be largely eliminated. The fact remains though that to it is now almost impossible to accuse the umpiring of being biased without looking a bit of an idiot. When neither side can feel legitimately aggrieved, it does help to diffuse tensions!

Both sides have made a big effort to play in the right spirit and Misbah should take great credit for the way that he has ensured that his side has been a band of happy warriors. The press-up celebrations have been great PR, if a little galling at times to the opposition and such is the atmosphere created, that even Jimmy Anderson who, like many medium-pacers, is inclined to get a little worked up when the adrenaline flows, has felt obliged to apologise spontaneously to the umpires for his behaviour and not before time.

The legacy of the 2006 and 2010 series in England was shameful. The 2016 series will be remembered instead for some amazing twists and turns and some quite wonderful cricket between two well-matched teams that played in the spirit of cricket.