Stani Army

Pakistan set the tournament alight with a brilliant victory over a very good New Zealand side.

The game marked the return of Abdul Razzaq to the international side and his breakthrough early in the New Zealand innings was vital in what was to follow and thus cannot be underestimated. He had a good day with the ball (2 for 17) although he didn’t get going with the bat; still not being able to play spinners the poor sod.

The star of the show was obviously Umar Gul with his record breaking figures of 5 for 6. It was the first time anyone has taken a 5-for in International Twenty20. Amazingly, he was on a hat-trick twice but never managed to convert either. In his interview after, he spoke of working on the yorkers and slower balls with coach Aqib Javed and said that he watched videos of Waqar and Wasim and boy did it show. Those figures will take some beating, and the fact that he is also number 3 and 7 on the Twenty20 best figures list, shows it wasn’t just luck.

Afridi was once again mesmeric with the ball and took, in our opinion, the best catch of the tournament so far.

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Wasim Akram has said that Younis Khan should have had a say in the preparation of the pitch in Karachi which saw four 150+ scores made on it. I suppose the fact that Pakistan had not played a Test for quite some time has drawn extra attention to the pitch we saw in Karachi but it raises the question of how much say a home team should have in the preparation of a pitch.

Yes, home advantage is fair but how far should this go?…far enough to spoil a Test match? Should the home fans and other conditions (apart from the pitch) be home advantage enough?

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Today, Wasim Akram’s long standing record of 502 ODI wickets was surpassed by the smiling assassin Muttiah Muralitharan. His victim, Gautam Gambhir, was Murali’s only wicket in their one dayer against India. Akram, told AFP:

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