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Follow UsImagine the year is 2044, and a kid asks you about Bangladesh cricket. You start recounting the biggest moments in their history, right from the 2007 ODI World Cup, where they defeated India, to their recent Test match victory in New Zealand.
Through all these glorious memories (and the not-so-glorious ones), there’s one common Bangladeshi cricketer who you’ll find there - Mushfiqur Rahim.
Cricketers older than his 37 years have played and aced this game and are lauded for their longevity. However, Rahim’s longevity feels longer than most. It’s not because of the white in his beard or his receding hairline. It’s because so many of these moments are important in the larger context (remember the early celebration in 2016?).
His 191 that came in 341 deliveries against Pakistan at the Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium was exactly one such innings, where his experience and his significance for Bangladesh became the wagons for yet another day full of cricketing glory.
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Before there was ever a 'one', there was always 'zero'. It doesn’t just exist as an indifferent symbol of nothingness. It adds a ton of meaning and swells to every single calculation known to humankind.
The leave in Test cricket is precisely that. It’s the zero of any batter’s innings. Any good Test innings is built on a well-judged and executed set of leaves. Even the Bazballers don’t smash every single delivery thrown to them. Rahim’s leaves and the deliveries he chose to defend were the bedrock on which he built the tall minaret of his 191 runs.
And oh boy, what a leave he has! If there was ever a spectrum of aesthetic leaves, it would begin with Rahim’s leave and end with Steve Smith’s.
Smith’s leave is supremely effective; it’s not the most symmetrical, as his hands go as high as they can while his body moves outside the line of the stumps, and he brings his hands down along with his bat shooting upwards like a submarine’s periscope.
Rahim does the actual leaving part all right, although his hands are not as upright as they can be. They are just slightly bent. And then he moves his body out of the line of the stumps, almost like a trained Kathak dancer. The hands are still bent, and the bat moves towards gully with a gentle flourish. It’s like a proper act in itself.
In a day where things happened at a snail’s pace, this was like observing the beauty of a ghat section in the Konkan region from a train’s window. And it always did the job it was meant to do.
Apart from that, his game against pace was watertight throughout his innings on Day 3 and 4. He met the ball under his eye whenever he went on the back foot, and even while driving or defending on the front foot, his bat and pad permanently moved in sync, and so did his head, giving him an impressive control percentage of 85.9% in his innings.
He faced 255 balls from the four Pakistani pacers in this innings and scored 111 painstaking runs against them. He mostly played them on the offside, never trying to forcefully change the natural direction of the delivery and playing with a full face of the bat. This was an attempt at endurance, and it was immensely successful.
This innings exuded a nostalgic charm also because Rahim targeted the spinners with full intent, a bowling type he’s always been comfortable against across the subcontinent (he averages 57 and 57.5 against spin in India and Sri Lanka, respectively).
He scored 80 runs in 86 deliveries against spin, including a six against Agha Salman, where he charged him down and tonked him over long on for a six. This was not only strategic but quite effective, too, as he targeted the weakest link of the bowling attack. Moreover, eight of his nine boundaries against spin came on the leg side, almost an exact mirror image of his wagon wheel against pace.
He faced 341 deliveries in his innings, which tired the Pakistani bowlers and the fielders who had to field for almost two days under the hot Rawalpindi sun. That fatigue began showing when three Bangladeshi catches were dropped in the second and third sessions of the fourth day.
Just by trodding and trodding and trodding and trodding and trodding, the old warhorse tired the new shiny mechanical engines of Pakistan.
You can understand their plight by the fact that the 117.3 overs bowled by Pakistani pacers here were the second-most overs bowled by them in the last twenty years.
Only time will tell how much effect that would have on the freshness of Pakistan's pace attack going into the second Test. However, at the end of Day 4, Bangladesh had their biggest-ever first-innings lead in a Test in Pakistan. All because an old warhorse showed the power of his experience and why he’s so integral to everything Bangladesh cricket.
Screenshot credits - Tamasha Web
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