Self-assured Aslam absorbs Brisbane lessons

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Melbourne:For a long, long while in Pakistan’s first innings in Brisbane, Sami Aslam was threatening to construct that peculiar – but not unique – kind of mini-epic that emerges only in an innings as disastrous as that one. Its virtue was found purely in the prolonged act of its existence.
The decision-making of others around him was frazzled by the bounce in the surface, so much so that it wasn’t actually the bounce that was doing for them. They were edging fuller-length deliveries to the cordon.
Aslam stood at the other end and watched, impassive and still. It wasn’t that he was unaffected by the pace or bounce, or the lights and the pink ball, or the huge crowds. He was, but his judgement of what to play and what to leave, especially around off stump, was not polluted.
That has been developed over years and years, mostly by simple methods: a new ball, hurled at him around his off-stump, from halfway down the pitch.
Jackson Bird beat him twice on the outside edge, in one over, but those were genuinely good deliveries. Not once in 100 balls and 135 minutes did he chase or dab or poke at a ball outside off-stump that he didn’t need to. The only real misstep was an attempted sweep off Nathan Lyon that he missed and one that he top-edged onto his helmet.
Josh Hazlewood hit him twice on the helmet, though the second time it looked as if Aslam allowed it to strike him, turning his back into it. The next ball was fuller and outside off, and Aslam watched it go by like he was Otis Redding on the dock watching the tide roll away. There were more bouncers and short balls, from Mitchell Starc, that he just swayed out of the way of. Aslam has a boxer’s nose and, in the unfussy way in which he reacted to the blows, perhaps a little bit of the disposition as well.
Had Sarfraz Ahmed not come in later and made the runs that he did and taken Pakistan comfortably past three figures, Aslam’s 22 would have been a true mini-epic. It did look like the kind of an innings, however, from which he would have come out with a greater understanding not only of the conditions but also of himself and his game.
“When we came to Cairns, the practice pitches were very familiar, with low bounce and even the match pitch,” he said. “When we came to Brisbane we got a lot of good practice on the practice pitches because they were bouncy like the match pitches. The coaches really worked hard with us. That helped us adapt to the conditions.
“But a Test is a really different scenario so the first innings in Brisbane was a little difficult. It was a very different type of bounce and it was the first time I have played on a surface like this. But in the second innings, it was quite a bit easier.”