Can India douse Pak pace fire?

Even as a horde of Special Task Force members circled the outdoor nets at the R Premadasa stadium while gripping their semi-automatic machine guns perilously tight and their eyes designed to catch any and all anomalies, the Pakistan cricket team went about its practice session as if children at a playground. 

Morne Morkel, their bowling coach, was chasing the likes of Shaheen Afridi and Naseem Shah with bottles of cold water with the intention of drenching them. Frankly, the bowlers wouldn’t have had a problem for it was hotter on Saturday than it has been in the nation’s capital for nearly a month. 

All sights considered, it didn’t seem like Pakistan were only twenty-four hours from taking on arch-rivals India in a Super Four clash of the Asia Cup on Sunday. 

The coolness to their gaiety was in stark contrast to the Indian side’s late afternoon session which was a more serious affair: plenty of left-armers were employed, plenty of short-pitched throw-downs were tackled and there was an insistence on batting on exposed concrete pitches (to get more pace off the surface). 

Pace trio

All this because India haven’t had the best of times when confronted by Pakistan’s young pace trio of Afridi, Naseem and Haris Rauf. 

The last time around in Pallekele, a week ago, the story was much the same where they were reduced to 66 for four before Ishan Kishan and Hardik Pandya went about a face-saving exercise and propped them to 266.

It was a contest Pakistan would have fancied themselves to win given how acclimatised to these conditions their batters have been of late. 

Sadly, we’ll never know what might have played out because rain denied a result, but this is yet another chance to add life to a rivalry. 

That the game is in Colombo will also help because there will, undoubtedly, be more fanfare in the nation’s capital than in sleepy Pallekele. And this contest needs all the additional help to keep up with the hype around it. 

Expectedly, both sides played down the significance of the contest during the pre-match pressers with Pakistan skipper Babar Azam and Indian opener Shubman Gill saying this is as good as any other game. 

Surely, there is an element of truth to that, but the fact that they share such a vibrant, even if tumultuous, history with each other makes it unlike any other contest in this tournament. 

In all this, there’s the not-so-little fact that KL Rahul will be playing his first competitive game for India since March of this year. In that span, Kishan has quickly risen as an exciting option in the middle-order, and as a ‘keeper, but the Indian management, clearly, has a soft corner for the man from Karnataka. 

While his consistency over the course of the last two years has aided this, his injury-riddled history isn’t a great sign. We’ll know come Sunday if he is as fit as the management is making it seem, more so when he gets down to ‘keeping. 

But if he comes through, that could be one less headache for India going into the World Cup. If he doesn’t, the Indian team will have some answering to do.