After Pakistan’s victory in the second ODI, the two teams headed to Perth locked at 1-1. But they were eventually unlocked, as Australia cruised home with five overs and seven wickets to spare.
Here are the ratings for the third ODI between Australia and Pakistan.
Billy Stanlake
Grade: B-
Billy Stanlake missed the second ODI, but he was back for this game at the WACA, doing his thing where he’s very tall and lanky, as you’d expect from a man whose name is an anagram of ‘is tall, be lanky’.
In fact, so tall is Stanlake that many suspect he’s just Peter Siddle on the shoulders of Joe Mennie.
But whether he’s one man or two, Stanlake started off his bowling spell with not just tallness and lankiness but also rubbish bowlingness as well, conceding 27 runs off his first two overs. And while he improved, with a maiden in his third, he also wasted Australia’s sole review when he failed to mention to captain Steve Smith that the LBW they were reviewing had been clubbed onto the pad.
In the end, he finished with 1-55 off his ten overs, when Shoab Malik was caught behind for 39, eliciting the usual congratulations from teammates for his first ever international wicket.
Well, mostly the usual congratulations. David Warner reached hard for the Stanlake bum-pat but Billy’s tallness meant he was forced to instead settle for a weird kind of lower-thigh caress.
Matthew Wade’s hands
Grade: B+
The catch Matthew Wade took to give Stanlake his first wicket was one of the few times Wade’s hands didn’t let him down behind the stumps, with his glovework for the innings featuring a dropped catch, a missed stumping and four hurled overthrows.
Still, there’s a bright side to each of those so-called ‘mistakes’.
The missed catch? Maybe not a missed catch at all, as it may not have even carried to him. This opens up a huge opportunity for Wade to eliminate all of his problems with dropped chances by simply taking about five steps back so no future catches carry.
The missed stumping? Well, you’ve got to expect a keeper to struggle when trying to grab a sharp-turning snorter from Travis Head on the WACA dustbowl.
And the four overthrows? They came about when the batsmen were trying to scamper a second run, so it’s perhaps yet another example of Wade unleashing a glorious six. And who can blame him for that?
Binary batting
Grade: C+
Pakistan were well poised to make a total in excess of 300 when they reached 4-213 after 40 overs. Instead, they somehow lost 3-50 in the final ten overs to splutter their way to 7-263.
It was yet another example of Pakistan’s binary batting – where they’re either very good or very bad, but nothing in between.
And it wasn’t just the team as a whole. Opener Sharjeel Khan faced 47 balls for his fifty, with eight fours and a six. Six of those fours and the six came from just two brutal overs, with the rest of his innings being somewhat meandering.
It’s binary all the way down with Pakistan, which any mathematician versed in chaos theory could tell you is some kind of fractal approach to batting.
Fitting, of course, that Pakistan embrace chaos theory so completely.
Peter Handscomb’s wicket
Grade: A-
Pakistan had Australia in typical trouble early, dismissing Warner and Usman Khawaja in successive overs to have the home side 2-45 in the tenth over, with both of the new batsmen at the crease – Steve Smith and Pete Handscomb – yet to score.
Handscomb was clearly nervous on debut and struggling to score. Yes, he’d taken a fine, low-down catch during the Pakistan innings that fittingly saw his hands comb the grass, as his fingers just made their way under the plummeting ball.
But his early struggles with the bat gave Pakistan an idea. A crazy idea. A beautiful idea. They would outwit the Australians by refusing to dismiss the trembling debutant.
So Handscomb was caught behind early – but off a no-ball. He had to go back and continue nervously batting. Then he was dropped at backward point – also from a no-ball. Y’know, just in case.
A run-out chance from the outfield? Close enough to make Handscomb fret, but not close enough to risk dismissing him.
Handscomb finished his innings by inside-edging balls past his stumps to the boundary. By this stage, the young man’s confidence was shattered. Pakistan had his number.
Eventually, they took pity on him and agreed to have him caught behind for 82. But the moral victory was theirs.
The Allan Border Medal
Grade: A-
The Allan Border Medal is on Monday night. As Australia cruised to their cricketing, but not moral, victory, Channel Nine showed the viewers’ verdict for who would win the prestigious award.
Turns out the answer is Steve Smith. Congratulations to the Australian captain – and congratulations to Cricket Australia for working out a way to finally streamline the event all the way down from a tedious night of tuxedo-clad ballot-counting to a five-minute Michael Slater segment at the back end of a tedious ODI run chase.
The Aussie needed every centimetre of his height and reach to reel that one in!
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