Moeen Ali and England came up agonisingly short against a debutant with nerves of steel in a game they should have won.
All rounder Aamer Jamal was given 15 runs to defend from the final over and despite facing down a well-set Moeen, he came up trumps to secure the five run win even though the target was only 146. The stand-in skipper is one of the most destructive batters in the world and finished 51 not out, but was left kicking himself after failing to get hold of more than one big shot in an over of wide yorkers.
He missed out from the first two balls. From the third he launched a giant six over mid-wicket to make it eight runs required from three balls, but seamer Jamal, coping with a sodden ball thanks to the dew, stuck to his plan and it worked.
England will be frustrated with the way their top order, bar Dawid Malan, capitulated up front in the hunt for such a straightforward total. Alex Hales, Phil Salt and Ben Duckett were all pretty generous with their dismissals before the Pakistan spinners put a choke hold on the chase.
Shadab Khan and Iftikhar Ahmed were outstanding until Moeen and the lower order got the chase back on track until they were derailed at the death. “It was a very good game again,” said Moeen. “Obviously we are disappointed we didn’t chase those runs.
“I feel we’re a better team than that. We got strangled in the middle by their spinners, and we couldn’t get going. We knew it would be hard for the bowlers to control the ball with the dew and the rain from yesterday. We had to hang in there and then go hard at the end.”
England’s bowlers had held up their end of the bargain by dismissing the home team inside 19 overs thanks to the returning Mark Wood, and fellow seamers David Willey, Sam Curran and Chris Woakes.
But the fact that there were two run outs to go with bowlers’ scalps illustrates just how out of sorts the Pakistan batters were in Lahore. A slower pitch and outfield was always going to make big scores hard to come by, and if the butter-fingered Hales had actually caught Mohammad Rizwan on nine off Willey then the target
Hales has dropped catches in three out of the four games he has played in and twice it has been seriously costly. He put down Rizwan on 23 in the 2nd match before he went on to make 88 not out, and then here he dropped the same man at mid-off before watching him add another 54 for to his score.
Wood was again the star turn using the short ball to great effect for two of his wickets in his 3-20, something other teams will have noticed ahead of the World Cup. Woakes’ grabbed 1-30 in his first game back since March to provide another highlight for the team before they head to Australia.
