The Pakistan Way offers the perfect Pakistani day

That was a good 24 hours for Pakistan cricket. Try saying those words out loud, to a friend, at a dinner party, even to yourself in an empty room. Do you notice the inflection in your voice when you get to the end of that sentence? It’s surprisingly hard to express that sentiment without the muscle memory in the vocal cords bracing itself for the warning that always qualifies such a sentence, an unfortunate prolonged phenotype generated by painstaking years of real-world experience.

“That was a good day, but what do the English say about our suspiciously sudden reverse turn? That was a good day, but why do I suddenly have to pay attention to the Supreme Court and someone called?” Justice Qayyum? That was a good day, but gosh, why can’t we find the doorman at your hotel room? That was a good day, but boy, weren’t those two without balls really quite big?”

Calm your vocal cords though and say it again like you mean it, because days like these are what fans suffer with their team. Not for year-end financial reports, and certainly not for long-term plans. Take a look at what’s going on at the PCB and see if you’re optimistic about any plans surviving beyond the next political or administrative upheaval. A dying patient does not eat cabbages and lettuce and waits for the six-pack that will arrive a year later. They get the sugar hit when he shows up, and in the last 24 hours, Pakistan got theirs.

Few beyond the tragedy in Pakistan will pretend they were paying close attention to the Emerging Men’s Asia Cup until they checked the score halfway through Pakistan’s innings on Sunday and saw the dominance they were exerting over the Indian bowlers in Colombo. Having been fully delivered by that very side earlier in the week, there was little interest and less expectation. But when the Ashes in Manchester reached their sodden and wet denouement, the young Pakistan team was on fire putting the Indian bowlers to the spade before rolling through their batsmen, a 128-run victory that saw them galloping off with the trophy.

Yes, Pakistan had sent a much more experienced team to the tournament than India, but when you want that dopamine hit, you ignore the disappointment of a friend pointing it out. Pakistan’s senior team, also in Colombo on the eve of the second Test against Sri Lanka, seemed to have no such analytical qualms as they basked in A-side glory. Despite an early start on Monday, they were up well past bedtime to serenade Mohammad Haris and his team as he walked in with the trophy, Shaheen embracing him in a bear hug.

There’s never a bad time for a cake in Pakistan cricket, and one was magically conjured up, a rather unassuming chocolate fudge cake. What mattered most, however, was the message scrawled on the icing, one addressed to both the senior team and their recently triumphant youth counterparts. “The Pakistan Way,” he said simply, a blanket term that the coaching staff and management hope will translate into a brand of cricket that entertains and excels.

A former Pakistani player who made his debut in the 1990s spoke of the stark divide between the younger and more experienced players, and the terrifying authority they wielded over already intimidated newcomers. In his debut, he sat in one of the comfortable pavilion chairs that a senior player had marked as his own. When the player noticed what this young upstart had the audacity to do, he barked “Who do you think you are?” in front of the entire team, before throwing him out of the chair.

No such division existed here, as Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi and the Pakistan side sat on the marble steps of the Cinnamon Grand with the A side, laughing, joking, feeding each other cake. Looking from an emerging player to a veteran player, it became impossible to tell which was which. No one was more equal than the other.

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Tomorrow in Colombo, and now it’s the turn of the senior team. Babar loses the toss – after all, some things never change – and Sri Lanka are inserted into a flat, demon-free wicket. But it doesn’t matter how flat a wicket is if you’re going up against an outfield team that has metamorphosed, almost overnight, into a world-class team.

The starters tackle Shan Masood with a quick single. Reckless, because Masood can do a little of everything. He bats, sometimes bowls, often goes out for quality interviews. And really, he really plays well. He picks up the ball and, in the same movement, knocks down the stumps with a direct hit. He’s almost as flexible and languid as his cover unit, and here he’s just as effective.

Naseem Shah takes over. Naseem is young enough to be part of the A-team that just won that trophy yesterday; he is two years younger, in fact, than the average age of that squad. He now faces Angelo Mathews and Dimuth Karunaratne, two of the greatest players of a generation that flourished as Naseem tried to convince his parents to let him play cricket. But he’s head and shoulders above Mathews, who keeps getting pummeled by one that cuts and bites. He is lucky to miss twice, but the third time is a charm for the Pakistani bowler. Weren’t there supposed to be no demons in this field?

He’ll soon be able to argue that point with Karunaratne in the locker room, because Naseem has also sent perhaps the best starter in the world. He threw a fuller one, lighting up Karunaratne’s eyes. This will be an easy move as the Sri Lankan opener has made a career of surviving good deliveries to finish off others like these. He leans towards an expansive drive, but there’s that seam move again. A feather of an inside edge, a collision of leather and wood, the rattle of a pair of altered rungs. Pakistan is flying.

Sri Lanka mount a desperately late attempt to cage that bird, to dampen the excitement with a gutsy fifth-wicket partnership, just as they did at Galle. It works, up to a point, and Pakistan’s lead is being blunted, play neutralized. Only until Naseem returns, and this time with a different strategy. He may have swing and seam, but he also has bounce and pace. A short delivery is lifted slightly, and Dinesh Chandimal out of patience gives Imam-ul-Haq a straight catch.

It could well be seen as an act of surrender for what follows. Pakistan is sharing the joy and now they let Abrar Ahmed take charge. The wickets that fall aren’t spectacular in the same way as Naseem’s, but there is a clinical efficiency in Pakistan that envelops the lower order, a frustrating Achilles heel in the past.

Babar, often charged with captaincy on autopilot, has taken control, manipulating both the pitch and the bowling changes with impressive and calculating cunning. Dhananjaya de Silva picks a man positioned exactly for the shot that sees him pocket Saud Shakeel. Prabath Jayasuriya again confronts Masood; he presumably missed the first part of the innings. And to top it off, Ramesh Mendis holes out Shakeel in a similar fashion to De Silva.

There’s still one session to go, and Pakistan isn’t quite done keeping its foot on the pedal. They shake off an early layoff from the imam. Hungry for runs, Abdullah Shafique and Masood are piling it up at breakneck speed, taking the closers off the attack before hitting Mendis and Jayasuriya over the top. Masood was particularly aggrieved last week when on the hard side of a Hawk Eye call he thought he should have gone the other way. Today, he was caught dead from the front, but the referee can’t see it, and Sri Lanka somehow couldn’t review.

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. It’s a roundabout compliment that has hung around Masood for much of his career, but today he shows that he can be both. It is he, in particular, who gives the spinners no hiding places, looting them for 30 runs from 28 balls as Pakistan take out 103 balls from a hundred, the fastest innings hundred for them since records began. Masood, it turns out, can do more than just a little bit of hitting. His half century, his first in 17 innings, comes in just 44 balls. Shafique also combines luck and quality, surviving a dropped catch and lbw shout as he recovers his first half-century in 12 innings.

There’s nothing that isn’t working for Pakistan, and when the sun goes down, they are within scoring distance of Sri Lanka. They will take the lead early tomorrow, and on the evidence of this they will gallop over the hills and out of sight.

That, at least, is what The Pakistan Way wants you to believe. No one quite knows what it is, and it’s a term that can always lack a clear definition. But over the past 24 hours, there’s been a glorious glimpse of what could become.