Yasir, Younis and the gift of Pallekele

One of the ways that desi culture intersects with globalisation is that most people have one or more relatives living abroad, upon whom it is incumbent to bring back gifts when they return to the homeland. Chocolate, perfume and electronic equipment are the most popular choices, but every now and then someone brings over something that the recipients don't know what to do with. For example, back before coffee shops became common, a relative gifted my family artisan coffee and a French press. After a few failed attempts at familiarising ourselves with the bitter, intense flavour of the coffee and trying to understand the mechanics of the flask, everyone gave up. The two items were prominently displayed in a kitchen cabinet and never touched again.

I have a feeling that the third Test of the Sri Lanka v Pakistan series might be marked by the same confused reverence in Pakistani cricket. On the one hand, its value is undeniable - it brought all sorts of statistics and records that will stand for a long time. On the other hand, it was the most unpredictable conclusion to what had been a genuinely unpredictable series - Pakistan chasing down a huge score with disturbing ease.

Pakistan looked out of the Galle Test by the halfway mark, yet roared back to a stunning win. Then Sri Lanka defied the seeming inexperience of their bowling attack and ripped the visitors apart in the one stadium where they hadn't been doing well. Then one of the world's worst chasing sides gobbled up a mammoth target like they were at one of those garish, 100-dish, all-you-can-eat Iftar buffets.

But if someone can truly define this win, it was Younis Khan. Like the player himself, this win (and series) was something of undeniable class that few people could truly appreciate in its own time. Pallekele* was the latest in a series of rare gifts that Younis specialises in - the big score in the second innings. This list of the highest scores in the second innings by Pakistanis batting away from home includes most of the country's greats in the top ten. There's Hanif, Saeed, Javed, Asif Iqbal, Majid Khan, Saleem Malik, but none appears more than once - except Younis, who shows up three times. Tweak the parameters slightly to get the list of highest scores by Pakistanis in the fourth innings, home or away, and Younis figures four times in a top ten where no one else has a repeat appearance.

Yet having watched the Pallekele innings in all its surreally calm glory, there remains an instinct to downgrade it - where was the nail-biting finish, the crumbling pitch, the crooked umpire, the hostile, baying crowd? Apart from the fact that the pitch was not as benign as it appeared, Younis was battling something far more monumental - the ghosts of Pakistani chases from the past. As someone with five ducks and a world-record five hundreds in fourth innings, Younis knows the perils of these precarious battles more than most. He knows how fragile, how prone to disaster, they can be - how they yearn for the ascetic's calm he brings.

And perhaps his steady hand is also what explains a crucial hallmark of the latter half of his career - the ability to steer young batsmen to greatness. He was at the crease guiding Fawad Alam, Asad Shafiq and now Shan Masood to debut centuries. He was batting with Azhar Ali and Ahmed Shehzad for their second hundreds. He was also batting at the other end when a certain promising youngster made his second Test century.

But if Younis defined the third Test, Yasir Shah defined the series. It seems like only the day before yesterday that he made his debut against Australia, and only yesterday when we were bemoaning Pakistan's poor use of him in the World Cup. Yet here he is today, breaking records for the fastest haul of wickets in Test cricket for Pakistan. While he has inherited Saeed Ajmal's mantle as the heart of the team, he will not be alarming the puritans anytime soon. A look at his Test wickets so far show a host of deliveries that would delight a connoisseur of legspin, but it would be even more instructive to look at the balls just before the ones that took the wickets - quite a few batsmen have been set up and then defeated with cunning subtlety. Most decisively, Yasir has a habit of getting rid of the opposition's best batsmen. In his ten Tests, he has dismissed Ross Taylor four times in six innings, Mushfiqur Rahim and Steven Smith three times out of four, and Angelo Mathews and Kumar Sangakkara every other innings.

If Younis was perplexing and Yasir deceptive, Pakistan as a whole were gloriously unpredictable. It is one thing to chase down 377 with seven wickets to spare, quite another to do it after a pathetic display of 215 in the first innings. Sarfraz Ahmed, who has seemed to improve both his keeping and batting, was the only reason the situation wasn't worse. At 13 for 2, the second innings seemed to be headed the same way, and everything at that point carried the stench of an impending, demoralising Pakistani loss. Masood, whose debut match had involved a genuinely nervous fourth-innings chase of 40 (!), played the innings of his young career. It wasn't so much the aesthetics of his play as the assuredness of it, and it was he who decisively neutralised Sri Lanka's spin threat in the final innings in Pallekele.

For Pakistani fans, the Galle Test is more likely to go down in folklore than the third one, but for neutrals it was arguably one of those rare series that irrefutably proves how beautiful it is to follow a game that takes several days to complete. It is one of those gifts that very few know how to appreciate, and it should be cherished all the more for it.