There are ODIs in the lead up to the Champions Trophy, and Tests with WTC points up for grabs. But first, let’s sit through three T20Is
Danyal Rasool09-Dec-2024Few experiences are as universal as the meaningless preamble you have to sit through before the real event begins. It’s unmistakable in the opening ceremony before the start of a T20 league, a blend of unchallenging pop music and the dazzle of fireworks that, while promising to be different, look like just about every fireworks show there has ever been. Perhaps it’s a family member determined to bring you up to speed with the finest details of an increasingly boring event as you curse yourself for asking a question that couldn’t be answered with a simple yes or no. Maybe it’s even this article, which you have probably already scrolled down a few times to work out what the point is.It’s hard to say, really. South Africa play Pakistan in a three-match T20I series starting Tuesday, and it’s impossible to talk about that in any meaningful way. They have just wrapped up an enthralling Test match win against Sri Lanka in Gqeberha to keep a berth in the WTC final on track. There is no T20 World Cup until 2026, and none of the players part of the Test squad will be available for the first T20I, which is in Durban. The squad, captained by Heinrich Klaasen, underwent a training camp in Pretoria before leaving for Durban on Sunday. The team’s attention and the fans’ emotional investment are very much attached to the red-ball side for now; this is just a series they must sit patiently through.Pakistan’s choose-your-own-adventure style white-ball team now finds itself pitched up in South Africa, having played six such games in Australia, and another six in Zimbabwe. If the team management’s views are anything to go by, you can read a lot into the ODI series in Australia that they won, and definitely nothing into the T20I series, which they didn’t. T20Is, as head coach Aqib Javed, who took over partway through the tour of Australia, said, were being treated experimentally for now. So when Pakistan beat Zimbabwe in both ODI and T20I series, and yet dropped a game in each format along the way, no one seems to be any wiser about whether that was a good or bad overall result.Related
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And that will not change whatever happens over the next week. Pakistan’s focus, too, is less on this format than any of the others, given they are in the middle of their busiest Test season this century, and official hosts of the Champions Trophy in just over two months. They have brought back some of the big names they rested during the tour of Zimbabwe, with captain Mohammad Rizwan, Babar Azam and Shaheen Shah Afridi all returning. Opening batter Saim Ayub and left-arm wristspinner Sufiyan Muqeem, the brightest spark in Zimbabwe, will be intriguing to watch against stiffer opposition, but really, Pakistan, too, await the Test series to come, or at the very least the ODIs the week after.And the jury’s out on the extent to which South Africa can be called stiffer opposition, anyway. Aside from Klaasen, Reeza Hendricks, David Miller, Anrich Nortje and Tabraiz Shamsi, it’s not clear any of the other names in that squad would get into a full-strength XI; those are the only five in the squad who played the T20 World Cup final earlier this year.The bilateral white-ball game’s struggle for relevance can also be exemplified by highlighting that if those kinds of fixtures were anything to go by, South Africa have had a horror T20I year. They haven’t won a single bilateral series in the format, whitewashed twice by West Indies, drawing 1-1 against Ireland, and soundly beaten at home by a second-string India side while the high-profile players were in Australia for the Tests. But all of that feels irrelevant to the point of not being worth discussing. Not only have they been unable to field full-strength sides for most of those fixtures, but when they did, they found themselves within a Suryakumar Yadav shoe size of winning the T20 World Cup, and no bilateral series will change that.Heinrich Klaasen will lead South Africa in the T20I series•ICC/Getty ImagesBilateral results are a truer depiction of Pakistan’s standing in the format, largely because the T20 World Cup reflected it, too. They have won two T20I series, but they have come against Ireland and Zimbabwe – and Pakistan dropped a game in each. They kicked off the year with a 4-1 reverse against New Zealand which turned out to be the only series Afridi captained in, before drawing 2-2 at home against the same opposition, when New Zealand’s best players were at the IPL, and being thrashed 2-0 by England in May, and 3-0 to Australia last month. Rounding it all off was an ignominious World Cup exit at the first hurdle, where they lost to India and, famously, to USA.But if one of bilateral series’ biggest woes is a lack of context, there is some to be had from not too long ago. It feels surreal to think of it now, but during the late 2010s when there was half a decade between two T20 World Cups, Pakistan were the best side in the world, and it wasn’t all that close. That could be determined almost entirely through bilateral series, and Pakistan won 11 of them on the spin; they are still the only side to have managed that.It was in early 2019 that run ground to a halt in a classic series in this country, where South Africa eked out a 2-1 result. Pakistan are far from that T20I side, but perhaps the seeds of this managed decline were sown right there.And if they can look back at this series as the point where they reversed that unhappy slide, well, then this is one preamble that might have been worth it after all.
