Imagine you are 21 years old. You have played eight first-class matches in your life. You did not even have a passport a week ago. Then you land in England. Your first over averages 89.7mph. Every single delivery of that over is quicker than every other ball any Pakistan bowler has sent down on this entire tour. You trap the greatest Test batter England has produced before you have conceded a single run in Test cricket. You finish with four wickets. Then you come back with the bat, score 81 from the bottom of the order in a day, and end up as the second-highest run scorer of the side. You break the record for the most sixes by a debutant in Test history. And you play an innings that wakes up an entire ground, and an entire country, in the space of a couple of hours. That is where you tell the world that Pakistan has never had a shortage of talent. Only a shortage of people willing to look for it. What a story. What an absolute beauty of a Test cricket session.

My respect for KG Rabada has soared over the last few years. I think he is one of the greatest bowlers of our generation, and we do respect him, but our respect should climb even higher. On commentary, while Carey, Cummins and Starc were batting, I heard the commentators insisting again and again that South Africa needed Rabada to force a breakthrough. Ntini was pleading: we need Rabada to make the breakthrough, please go to Rabada. And Rabada is summoned. The very first delivery he bowls is an absolute rocket. Two or three deliveries later, he castles Mitchell Starc. What a decisive bowler. KG Rabada in South Africa is just too good. Badshah of these tracks.

I think we are able to witness day 5 because of the wall established by Travis head to stop South Africa sending Australia back to the hotel a bit early yesterday. It is not easy to play a mammoth innings like that when the chips are down, unless you are Travis Head and you know exactly how to counter the pressure. Until yesterday, the conversation was about Travis Head having a problem as a Test opener. Today, he has once again put a different question on the table: is he the ultimate clutch player or not? And just like that, the conversation has shifted. This guy has loads of self-belief. Anything in his range, he will pick it 100 times out of 100. He will not hold back, and he will never forget to smash anything in his arc. That is the Travis Head method, and on days like today it is almost impossible to stop.

I remember when asked during the World Cup about the criticism he faced in the past, Sanju replied: "When the World Cup is happening in the country, there is a lot of outside noise. I cut it off and focused on cricket... I shut down my phone. I was not on social media. That really helped me focus in the right direction." I don't exactly remember, but he also said something like, instead of calling out his critics, he embraced his shortcomings and worked more on his game. Many players would have crumbled under that noise. Sanju is a naturally gifted batter who looks very commanding on his day, but there is always a mental barrier a cricketer has to conquer in his career.

On the last ball, Glenn Phillips switched to a left-hander's stance and hit Bhuvneshwar Kumar for four, because he sensed Bhuvi had already read his strengths. So he did something extraordinary. That is exactly the point of Glenn Phillips. Such a character and team man he's. Bringing entertainment in whatever way possible. I would love to have this kind of man in my team. And it's not the first time he has pulled off something this. We all remember him wearing glasses against Jofra Archer in England. Then there are all the little stunning things he does, the kind that make you stop and rewind.He would always play for the team, always act as a team man, and always make sure the team is in a respectable position. The tricks never come at the team's expense. Just a perfect guy.

During the break, Makhaya Ntini and Shaun Pollock were saying that Rabada man, slightly calm down man, it's okay, your team is in a pretty commanding position. They were mentioning that Rabada was visibly frustrated as he wasn't getting favourable rewards considering his efforts. Now imagine that. The man was clocking over 150, bowling absolute rockets of deliveries, and yet being furious with himself. There's a reason why Rabada is where he is. Indomitable character. As Dale Steyn once said, when KG Rabada gives a f***, we win. SA with Rabada is a different unit altogether.

Travis Head averages 51.86 in Australia and 31.62 away from it. Eleven of Travis Head's twelve Test centuries have been made in Australia. The twelfth came at The Oval, a neutral ground, in a one-off final. He has never scored a Test hundred in an opposition's own country. This doesn't mean that it does make him a home-track merchant. But away numbers demand improvement. And the blame does not sit entirely with him. For most of his career he batted in the middle order. At the point he was already a proven force in Test cricket, Australia handed him a different challenge as an opener. It's a different ball game. What actually changed is that Australia gave him a brand new problem while the old one was still sitting there unsolved.

Although Shaheen Shah Afridi is still not fully back to his best, and still not bowling at his peak, his captaincy looked markedly sharper in this series. Yesterday, when he brought the pace bowlers again after 25 overs, it was a masterclass. The decision to bring on both Haris and Naseem, and the fact that they struck, was a shrewd one, which both the commentators and everyone on social media must have acknowledged. I really hope he returns to his best, so that our ODI unit under him becomes even more complete for the ODI World Cup.

Simon Harmer scoring runs isn't really surprising. His batting is backed by real pedigree. More than 7,000 first-class runs overall, including roughly 3,000 for Essex. His peak at domestic level came in 2018 against Surrey, where he made a magnificent 102 not out and showed he was capable of carrying an innings from lower down. And then there is also an inning of his featuring clean hitting. Finding himself on strike for the final six balls of an Essex innings, Harmer went after it hard.

This isn't only Temba Bavuma's supreme hundred of his career, this is also arguably one of SA's greatest skipper hundreds ever. Sometimes you don't need luck, you need Temba. Yep, marched in at 12 for 2, in savage batting conditions. Marched in under suffocating pressure from the hat-trick ball as well and grafted on three separate days to a total worth a declaration. South Africa were 97 for 5 at the end of day two, but Temba was there still. They were 110 for 6 today, but Temba was still there. SA ended with 425. Monumental innings. It's like he bats even better when his team is in crisis. Absolutely goated stuff. Yeah, he has that dawg in him. Epitome of resilience. All bow before Lord Bavuma!

The best part about this Arafat Minhas performance is that from tonight there is no excuse left to sideline him. Not for the ODI side, not for the T20 side. not because of your all rounder adjustment excuses, not because of your specialist bowler or better excuses. Give the man a permanent spot and be done with it. They have tried to stop my boy a lot of times. They could not. Tonight he locked every one of them, whoever they were and whatever the reason was supposed to be. One hell of a performance. What a night. Absolutely joyful.

Really unfortunate that Marco Jansen could not get his hundred today. He has three scores of 80 or more in Test cricket now, and nearly every one of them has been made the same way, which is his way: attacking. He has nine sixes today, batting at number eight, with South Africa 110 for 6. And he is doing it from down the order, which in South Africa is never the wrong option. On those pitches a lower order that counter-attacks is worth a lot and he is the reason their innings keeps getting rescued. MVP of South Africa. We have been saying it for a while now.

There is a misconception about Arafat Minhas that he is only a lower-order power hitter. That's not true I watched his under-19 cricket closely. He batted at four and five there, and he batted like a four and a five: the innings that stops the collapse, and the innings that finishes things off at the end. Yes he has power game too. but It is just not the whole of him. He can hold an innings together and he can play three of the best shots in the ground inside the same hour, and in his game those two things do not fight each other. His batting has improved a lot. I expect it to improve a good deal more.

My prediction is Hasan Nawaz is going to have a better ODI career than a T20 career. The reason is that he already knows how to anchor an innings, and he already knows which phase of the game to take charge in. That is the hardest thing to learn in fifty-over cricket for a middle order pose hitter. He is averaging somewhere around 70, and he keeps doing exactly whatever the situation asks of him, which is the only definition of consistency that counts in ODI cricket. Remember this post in two years.

why so many balls? Babar and Pakistan top 3 need to remember that since 2023 we are in the list of lowest strike rate. we need to be better than this. Gone are the days when we had always insurance that we'll accelerate later so we can take time. now since this this new rule of captain choosing old ball post 35 overs would bring reverse swing back. which means it'll not be as easy

Everybody remembers the 150 kilometres an hour and the white streaks on his face. Almost nobody remembers that Allan Donald retired with the best bowling average of any fast bowler in the history of one-day international cricket who took 200 wickets. 272 wickets at 21.78. Glenn McGrath took 381 at 22.02. The zinc, by the way, was sunblock, not war paint. Allan Donald is 60 today, and the thing that made him was never the speed. It was that he could do it again, and again, and again. In 1998 he took 80 Test wickets. More than any other bowler in the world that year, and still the fourth-highest tally anybody has managed in a calendar year in the history of Test cricket. He went to the top of the ICC Test rankings that year and peaked at 895 rating points the next one. He was 32 years old. A pure tearaway is supposed to be finished at 32. The Test career holds up the same way. 330 wickets in 72 matches at 22.25, with 20 five-wicket hauls, three ten-wicket matches, and a best of 8 for 71. He reached 250 wickets in his 50th Test, quicker than any South African had managed before him, and he became the first South African bowler to get to 300. 15,519 deliveries in Test cricket, on flat and unhelpful tracks around the world, and the average still starts with a 22. This is a man who converted aggression into something repeatable, which is the hardest thing a fast bowler ever has to do, and the reason every Proteas quick since has been measured against him. Steyn eventually passed the Test record. Pollock passed the ODI one. Both of them were working to a standard Donald set first. ICC Hall of Fame, 2019. Sixty years old today. We filed him as the fastest bowler of his generation. He was the most accurate one. Happy birthday, AD.

Exactly two men in the history of cricket have made 300 in a Test match and 200 in a one-day international. One of them is Chris Gayle. The other one opened the batting for India for eleven years, scored 8,586 Test runs at a strike rate of 82.23, and averaged 49.34 while doing it. Virender Sehwag reached 300 off 278 balls, the fastest triple century anybody has made, and he made two of them. His 219 came off 149 balls and it was the highest score in the history of one-day cricket at the time. Before Bazball there was Sehwagball, and he was running it in both formats at once. Happy birthday to the man, 48 today. Start with the speed of the triples, because the size of them is the ordinary part. The 319 at Chennai in 2008 came off 304 balls at a strike rate of 104.93, with 42 fours and five sixes, and it was the first triple century scored at better than a run a ball. The 309 at Multan in 2004 reached 300 off 364 balls, 375 in all, and it is still the fifth-fastest triple century anybody has made. Two of the fastest triples in history belong to the same batter. Only four men have ever made more than one: Bradman, Lara, Gayle, Sehwag. India has produced three Test triple centuries in total and two of them are his, the first of them the first by any Indian. The near-misses are what tell you it was method rather than mood. 293 off 254 balls against Sri Lanka at the Brabourne in 2009, a strike rate of 115.35, seven runs short of a third triple. 254 off 247 at Lahore in 2006, inside a 410-run opening stand with Dravid that finished three runs short of a record set in 1956. That 254, the 309 at Multan and a 201 at Bangalore give him three scores of 200 or more against Pakistan. Nobody has more. The white-ball half of it is not a footnote. 251 one-day internationals, 8,273 runs, a scoring rate of 104.34. The 219 was made at Indore in December 2011 against the West Indies while he was captaining the side, and it stood as the highest score in the game's history until Rohit Sharma passed it. Ten months before that he opened India's World Cup with 175 off 140 balls against Bangladesh, the highest score anybody has made on the opening day of a World Cup, and India won that tournament. Galle, 2008. Two hundred and one not out, carried his bat, Wisden named him the leading cricketer in the world. England got a philosophy, a nickname and a decade of credit for batting like this. Sehwag did it in both formats and everyone knew that it's viru world and anything could happen. Happy birthday, Viru.

So Pakistan will trade green for pink against England at the Gaddafi Stadium on Sunday, all for breast cancer awareness. Surprisingly, this green and pink combination could look absolutely stunning. I hope this becomes a tradition, with the home side in every tri-series turning out in pink.

Incredible

Salman Ali Agha is the only player in this Pakistan side who adapts to the situation. If Babar and fakhar are two players that are considered permanent in this odi team, regardless of their performance in other formats agha should be third. Zero complaints from him in the fifty-over format. This is his format and he owns it. There is not enough wattage in the country to measure the electricity of that innings today. Clutch and cool, the way he always is. He is Pakistan's highest run-scorer in ODIs since 2023. He has chased the biggest totals this team has ever chased. Just an ideal cricketer in this format.

Good debut inning by this 19 years old. I might be exaggerating but regardless of whether he performs in this series, he should already be our first-choice keeper in the longer formats. I'll explain why. Last season he scored a thousand runs in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, took 32 dismissals in ten matches, and was named both Player of the Tournament and Best Wicketkeeper while Karachi Blues won the title. A wicketkeeper winning Player of the Tournament in a first-class competition is really interesting. First-class, 42.81 with four hundreds and a best of 154. List A, 34.77. T20, 21.28. The longer you give him, the better he gets. His maiden first-class hundred was 154, and then he came back out and made 65 not out in the same match. And he has been carrying teams since he was a child. He played for Pakistan Under-19 weeks after turning 16, captained them at the 2023 Asia Cup, and captained them at the 2024 Under-19 World Cup. Ghazi Ghori is fine and I want to be fair to him. First-class average of 39.81, three hundreds, a proper record. But across 21 List A matches he averages 24.64, and that is the number that tells you where he fits. As a backup, no complaints at all. Baig averages nearly three more than him in red-ball cricket and he is four years younger. He was picked ahead of Ghori today. Now leave him there.