AUS vs PAK – 1st ODI – Pakistan experience MCG deja-vu

In the ultimate analysis of Australia’s total dominance of Pakistan at home, Monday’s opening ODI will be a mere footnote, an extension of a seemingly unchanging trend. Australia have now won 27 of the last 28 completed matches across formats against Pakistan at home, the latest a victory at the MCG with 99 balls to spare.

However, it would do a great disservice to a Pakistani setback that was as sudden as it was unexpected. With Australia on top throughout the game, and having raced to 139 for 3 in the 20th over in pursuit of a sub-par 204, this looked to be as routine an ODI win as it could get. But Shaheen Shah Afridi got Josh Inglis out in the deep to bring in a new man and Haris Rauf bowled the next over – the fifth of his spell.

Rauf still had the pace to pull extra jumps on a surface that remained true throughout, with Marnus Labuschagne leading all the way to third. The following delivery drew Glenn Maxwell into a tentative poke first up, the ball kissing the edge on its quick journey through to Mohammad Rizwan. Australia had lost three wickets for no runs in five balls and Pakistan were back looking like favorites in a country where they have had minimal success.

“We all did our best, whether it was in the box or with the ball,” Rauf said after the game. “We had a plan to come short from my end. We were successful; we took a couple of wickets this way.”

In the end, Australia’s stranglehold on Pakistan proved difficult to shake. The visitors took another couple of wickets and exposed the tail, but Pat Cummins – as he has done so often in the past – held his nerve and ensured he was there to hit the winning runs and seal a two-wicket win.

Rauf lamented some of Pakistan’s sloppiness. They gave away 21 extras; Australia had conceded just four. Rauf himself sent a wide that far down and at such a high pace it went four and four extra while Naseem Shah bowled another five. Mohammad Hasnain, meanwhile, sent two wides over the batsman’s head in the same over in which he took Australia’s seventh wicket, and the pressure immediately shifted back to the visitors.

“We gave away extras, but when you attack you have to accept that these things happen,” Rauf said. “We made mistakes and we were a bit messy. We know these little things make an impact. If you’re a good bowling unit, you can cover the batters who fall 20-30 runs short if you tighten up the field We could have defended this too and we all tried really hard.

Falling painfully short at the MCG has been a Pakistan theme of late. It was Rauf’s penultimate over to Virat Kohli in the T20 World Cup 2022 that turned the tide in a contest Pakistan had dominated until then, with India sneaking to a last-ball victory. Three weeks later, an injury to Shaheen saw Pakistan’s momentum slip away in a nail-biting T20 World Cup final.

“We have memories on this ground that we remember. We lost a couple of very close games here against India and the World Cup final,” Rauf said. “We have made mistakes in the past but we try to stay in the present. The future is also not in our control and we enjoy the present. Sometimes the result doesn’t go your way and you have to accept it and then you try to learn of these failures.”

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