Posted by The thing about Ibrahim Zadran is he’s done this before. Everyone forgets because his incredible World Cup hundred against Australia was only the second-best knock that day.
He did however play – for our money – the finest shot of that particular match. Glenn Maxwell’s was a nonsense innings positively awash with nonsense shots, but none matched the delightfully productive geometric collision that was Ibrahim Zadran’s ramp shot off Pat Cummins.
It is a moment worth revisiting. In fact you should go and revisit it now. Go and read that article – open it in another tab – and then come back here for the rest of this article. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you.
Okay, you back?
Zadran made 129 that day and it was not a fluke innings. The guy averages over 50 after 35 one-day internationals, only one of which has been against a non-Test-playing nation (20 off 34 balls in a facile chase against the Netherlands).
Yesterday, against England, he made 177 and at one point or other exquisitely executed pretty much every shot going.
His first boundary was another of those bonkers ramp shots.
The shot he employed most frequently was the acutely-angled-bat drive that sends the ball to the boundary square on the off side.
The full face of the bat straight drive came out too. As did the flat-bat over the bowler’s head. He swept, he glanced, he hoicked. He ran down the pitch and larruped.
Zadran even appeared to apply fade to one straight drive off Jamie Overton, almost as if he wanted to play the ball not over the bowler, but round him.
At one point he played a shot that made batting coach Younus Khan – who knows a thing or two about this kind of thing – smile and shout “shot!”
None of these were his best shot, because midway through the 43rd over, Mark Wood cramped him for room and in so doing successfully saved two runs.
As Wood released the ball, Zadran tried to give himself room – but you can see here how Wood’s delivery didn’t allow for that.
This is a really horrible position to find yourself in as a batter: effectively retreating from a ball that’s spearing into you at a time when you were specifically trying to get away from it to get a good, clean swing at the thing.
Your balance is all wrong. The ball is in the wrong place. All your limbs are moving in the wrong planes.
And yet this is what Zadran did.
Wood was still topping 90mph in this over, but somehow Ibrahim Zadran was able to instantaneously skip his back leg over, balance himself and slot the ball back over Wood’s head and onto the boundary Toblerone.
One can only assume that had the delivery been even fractionally less awkward, it could have travelled 10cm further, if not more.
Not the most entertaining passage of cricket resulting from a shot played by someone called Zadran though. That would be this.
The King Cricket email is a simple thing. It is just the articles emailed to you. It is handy, it makes life easier and if you change your mind, you can just click ‘unsubscribe’ and we will stop sending them.
The King Cricket Patreon is simple too. It is either a way of saying thank you or a means of buying us more time to write stuff, depending on how you look at it. Really it is both.
Anyone else feeling a bit sorry for Pakistan after today’s wash-out? Get to host your first tournament 1996. Get to host your first ever ICC tournament that you’re supposedly sole host of – 1987 and 1996 were shared about, though in 1996 the final was held in Lahore. Spend a lot of money doing the stadiums up. And for all that, your only home advantage is to play one home match. Your second match you have to fly overseas even though you’re supposedly, and administratively, the sole host. You lose both of them, then your third match – a dead rubber anyway – can’t take place due to your own weather. All in all, pretty rubbish. And there’s a very good chance the final will take place overseas to really rub the salt in!!
(Having said all that, I remain sympathetic to India failing to travel to travel to Pakistan – it was a government decision, not a team one, so not quite comparable to previous cases where Sri Lanka or Kenya have been disappointed as hosts by teams refusing to travel. The Indian team could not have travelled even if they were keen to. The present compromise is probably more justifiable than the stitch-up in the T20 World Cup tournament structure that guaranteed India’s semi-final, if they were to reach it, in Guyana, even if the net effect of a permanent base in Dubai favours India even more than that TV money-grab did. The silly thing was really everyone agreeing to make Pakistan sole hosts when the political situation with India was clearly unresolved, and then having to thrash out a Plan B at the last minute rather than having it prepared well in advance. It wasn’t exactly an unknown unknown.)