Yasir struggled with expectation: Mushtaq

MANCHESTER: Mushtaq Ahmed, Pakistan’s bowling coach, believes that Yasir Shah struggled with the expectation of backing up his matchwinning display at Lord’s on the opening day of the second Test.

Yasir’s ten-wicket match haul was key to Pakistan securing their 75-run victory in the opening Test and propelled him to No. 1 in the world, but he finished the first day at Old Trafford with 0 for 111 from 31 overs as centuries from Alastair Cook and Joe Root led England to a commanding 314 for 4.

Although he made a couple of deliveries grip on the Old Trafford surface — two, in particular, spun and bounced appreciably at Root and Cook — England were able to milk him far more comfortably than they had done last week.

With only four frontline bowlers, Misbah-ul-Haq did not have many places to turn to for the lengthy spells required to allow him to rotate his three quicks. Yasir bowled 18 overs unchanged — split by the lunch interval — and by the time he was given a break, England had taken him for 69 runs and gone some way towards ensuring no immediate hangover from their poor display against at Lord’s.

“Sometimes the expectation does put you under pressure and you are trying to deliver the same performance,” Mushtaq said. “You start losing your basics, discipline and what he did in the last Test match. He got 10 wickets last time and maybe that momentum carried on and he forgot the basics.”

“I think the ball wasn’t coming nicely from his hand,” he added. “We did discuss it, but during a game it’s very hard for a coach to tell a player what to do. But we have good communication so I sent a couple of messages because the ball was coming out flatter with less spin. On a first-day pitch, the margin of error for a legspinner against good players like Root and Cook is very small.”

Root and Cook both used the word ‘tempo’ when pinpointing a key difference to their approach than at Lord’s, finding the right balance between not allowing Yasir to settle but avoiding anything as reckless as Root’s top-edged slog-sweep or Moeen Ali’s wild second-innings hack.

“It was just nice to see an improvement on the way we played him in the first game,” Root said. “Playing him with a straight bat, not going across the ball as much, on a day-one wicket it definitely made it a lot easier for us to take the risk out of it but still rotate the strike and score at a decent rate. We batted at a far better tempo than at Lord’s.”

Root, though, did admit a degree of nervousness when he brought out a strong slog-sweep against Yasir in the 51st over, with the captain at the other end, but this time it skimmed to the boundary rather than into the hands of a catcher. Such are the fine margins for batsmen.