On another difficult day for a Pakistan side in a state of near-permanent crisis, 21-year-old Azan Awais offered supporters a reason to be cheerful with a patient innings of 46 at Lord's.
Azan had spoken last summer about his first red-ball game in England, when he scored 98 off 170 for Pakistan Shaheens at Hove. “It was my first experience playing in England,” he said. “The conditions are challenging for an opening batter, requiring patient survival early on.”
Those were certainly the conditions he faced at Lord's 13 months later, and those patient survival skills helped him build an innings much more impressive than a quick summary of his contribution – 46 runs scored before he top-edged a pull to deep square leg – might suggest.
Facing a different level of challenge
However well the bowlers – Nathan Gilchrist, then of Kent and now of Warwickshire, and Hampshire's Scott Currie – performed when opening up for the County Select XI last July, if that was a challenging situation that required patient survival, then facing Jofra Archer and Ollie Robinson toying with the Lord's slope was another level entirely.
At Headingley last week, Azan's survival instincts seemed to require a little honing, given he was trapped lbw by the first ball of the series, one of only 15 he faced in the match. But here he told, slowly, a different story, and after 15 overs of Pakistan's innings he had faced 44 balls and scored off five of them, four of those singles.
He faced 58 more, scoring another 38 runs, before that story reached its conclusion. If it was not, in the end, the kind of individual score that normally earns giddy headlines and wild acclaim – like the half-century on his first-class debut two weeks after he turned 20, the unbeaten double ton he posted a month later, or the century in his first international innings against Bangladesh in May – he cannot be blamed for that.
Out of partners, not patience
He did not so much run out of patience as out of partners, the situation eventually forcing him on to the attack and abbreviating his demonstration of the kind of potential that will be seized upon by followers of a team whose main potential in recent years has been for self-destruction.
Bottom of the World Test Championship standings and eighth in the current world rankings, ahead of the West Indies side with whom they drew 1-1 a few weeks ago by the tightest of margins, and in a near-permanent state of cricketing crisis, Pakistan badly needed some kind of encouragement and on another otherwise difficult day the 21-year-old Azan was it.
One of three twentysomethings in this side and the youngest by nearly five years, here he was cast both as anchor and apprentice, quietly thriving at one end while at the other the rest of the team's batting lineup came and went, commitment to patient survival rarely evident. With Imam-ul-Haq, notionally Azan's opening partner, unable to bat because of a calf strain, Pakistan only had nine partnerships and Azan was involved in eight of them, of which only one lasted more than eight overs.
An appealing origin story
Azan has an appealing origin story, of playing obsessively with a plastic toy bat as a youngster, being coached by his father on the roof of the building they lived in and eventually playing for local youth teams before giving up the sport to focus on schoolwork. Aged 11, a few years out of the game, he and his father passed a stadium and he asked to go in. “When we were inside a coach spotted me and asked my father, 'He used to be good, why did he stop playing?' My cricket journey restarted the very next day,” he said. Ten years later he was opening the batting at Lord's.
He hit seven fours in all, but the two he scored off Archer best demonstrated his quality and focus. The first came in the eighth over of the innings, and with the England bowler conjuring a thrilling opening spell. He started with a 92mph delivery before ramping up to 94mph and then producing another of similar pace, pitched short, that screamed towards that batter's body and forced last-ditch evasive action. But when Archer then went too full, strayed a bit too wide, Azan was on to it, caressing wide of point. Later Azan watched a wonderful delivery just miss the outside edge, before calmly pinging the next through cover.
Both demonstrated an understanding that the fact one moment is difficult does not mean the next must also be. Another match, another series, seems to be spinning away from his team, but perhaps, sometime soon, the same will also be true for them.
