Alastair Cook, the England captain, responded to the challenge laid down by Pakistan’s run-hungry batsmen with a totemic unbeaten 168 to show his team the way to survive, and then thrive, in the harsh desert conditions at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi.
On Cook’s watch, England ground along to 290 for 3 by the close, a position of relative serenity given their travails in the field on the first two days. The bulk of his work was split between two century partnerships, first with Moeen Ali, who was a qualified success in his first outing as a Test opening batsman, and then with a hard-grafting Ian Bell, who eventually found his feet, and his footwork, after a horrifically jittery start before slashing at a wide one from Wahab Riaz in the closing overs of the day.
Pakistan’s total of 523 for 8 declared remains several sessions from being equalled, but this was a day for the grand gesture, and Cook duly delivered in spades. His iron-willed feat of endurance, spanning 329 balls and more than eight hours to date, is a direct descendant of his trio of centuries on the tour of India in 2012-13. At Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Kolkata, his efforts first turned the tide of a losing cause, then eventually paved the way for his greatest captaincy triumph to date. It’s not a bad memory to fall back on.
Batting with the bloodless resolve that has been the hallmark of his greatest feats in an England shirt, Cook built serenely on his overnight score of 39, as Pakistan’s bowlers took their turn to toil in the heat. Without the services of the legspinner, Yasir Shah, and with Shoaib Malik’s offspin a subdued option following his sapping double-century on the first two days, their four frontline bowlers managed a solitary strike between them in 105 overs, before Wahab bagged Bell then bowled the nightwatchman, Mark Wood, to double his tally shortly before stumps.
It was a lively finish to a tough day’s work from Wahab, whose ability to start a spell at full tilt made him Pakistan’s go-to man, albeit he served up nine no-balls and three wides in an occasionally erratic display. But his fellow seamers, Imran Khan and Rahat Ali, were a disappointment, their apparently economical figures a testament more to their lack of threat with either new ball than to any excellence on their part. There was, however, no mitigation for the murderously flat conditions.
Either way, Cook’s equilibrium could not be disturbed. With a judicious use of the cut, pull and sweep, allied to his usual caution outside off stump and his eye for a nurdle off the pads, the England captain notched up the 28th hundred of his Test career, and the third of a renaissance 2015 in which he has now gone past 1000 runs for the calendar year. At the age of 30, he is closing in inexorably on 10,000 career runs he is currently 502 runs adrift while his first century in the UAE completed a full set in all nine of the regions in which he has played Test cricket.
Only Pakistan itself eludes him as a venue England’s last Test there, at Lahore in 2005-06, came one match before his memorable century on debut in Nagpur. But it is fair to say he would thrive in his opponents’ real home as well. He has now scored eight of his centuries in Asia, a tally that has been matched only by Jacques Kallis among overseas batsmen. And Kallis’ tally of 2058 runs is also under threat.
He is not a batsman who generally relies on power to make his point, but when Cook clanged Shan Masood, at short leg, flush on the helmet in the closing moments of the afternoon session, he showcased the timing that he brings to his best performances. Masood was deemed fit to resume after leaving the field for treatment, but he wasn’t the only fielder to look a bit dizzy in the heat. Midway through the evening session, Cook offered the only genuine chance of his entire innings, a top-edged slog-sweep on 147 that flew to Fawad Alam, at deep midwicket.
Fawad made good ground but let the chance slip through his fingers, and one over later Zulfiqar Babar, the luckless bowler, had taken temporary custody of an unwanted record. If this game continues as it has started, with 70 wicketless overs already in the bank from England’s spinners, it will go down in history as the most overs of spin ever bowled in a Test match without reward.
Aside from a sprinkling of plays-and-misses outside off, Cook’s only other moment of alarm came on 101, when he stretched to sweep Zulfiqar and was struck on the pad perilously adjacent to off stump. Umpire Paul Reiffel turned down the initial appeal, and though replays showed he had been struck inside the line, Hawk-Eye suggested the ball was missing leg stump. The naked eye argued otherwise.
At the opposite end, in every sense, during their second-wicket stand of 165 was Bell, whose place in the team had been under scrutiny even before his crucial pair of dropped catches on the first day. Though he showed immense determination to survive 199 deliveries for his gritty innings of 63, he was never remotely as comfortable as his captain, right from the moment he edged his first delivery, from Imran, inches short of Mohammad Hafeez in the slip cordon.
Though Bell got off the mark with a single from his third ball, he was unable to add to that tally from a further 24 deliveries before lunch, and was particularly troubled by the spin of Zulfiqar, his conventional technique seemingly unsuited to the flat skiddy conditions.
Whereas Cook and Moeen, who made 35 in an opening stand of 116, had emulated Pakistan’s batsmen in playing the spinners with their bats well in front of the front leg, Bell’s preferred method was to press forward with bat and pad together. It made him a prime candidate both for lbw – two early appeals might well have been sent to the third umpire for reviews – as well as an inside-edge which eluded the grasp of silly mid-off.
After tea, Bell discovered a degree of fluency, initially by unfurling his rarely used sweep-shot to keep the strike rotating, and latterly by bringing his favoured glide to third man into play. The best of his strokes was arguably a calm cover-drive for three as Wahab over-pitched outside off stump, but the most gratefully played was his conventional pull through backward square to bring up his half-century from 134 balls. It was one of the few balls all day that allowed him to play to one of his strengths.
As the shadows began to lengthen, Bell reached once too often for his cover-drive and edged into the hands of gully. Sixty-five arduous overs had elapsed since the fall of Moeen, whose promotion from No. 8 to opening batsman was a qualified success. After 30 overs of hard toil with the ball over the course of the preceding two days, he was never at his most fluent – not that it mattered in the conditions – and was comfortably outscored by his captain throughout their opening stand.
However, he played his part nonetheless, and helped to post only England’s sixth 100-run opening partnership since the retirement of Andrew Strauss in 2012. Two of those came earlier this year – Cook’s stands with Jonathan Trott in Grenada in April, and with Adam Lyth at Headingley in June.
Moeen was untroubled aside from an awkward moment in the first hour when he was struck on the shoulder by a Wahab bouncer, but just when it seemed he might be able to press on to the sort of substantial score that might seal his audition, he was undone by one of the better balls of the day, a good-length delivery from Imran that nipped away by half-a-bat’s width and took the edge through to the keeper. But the agenda had been set and Cook remained on hand to take the minutes with typical diligence.
