Pakistan's fever dream: 2017 Champions Trophy

A Fakhar Zaman prophecy, a Mohammad Hafeez peak, and a Mohammad Amir spell - we haven’t seen anything like it before or since

Fakhar Zaman had a dream. It is not unusual for a cricketer to project the night before a game. Matt Hayden sat on the pitch trying to visualise where he was going to hit the ball the next day. This is a professional technique suggested by sports psychologists.

This is not exactly what Pakistan’s opener was doing. If you hear the story, it sounds more like he had an actual dream, and in it, he was playing in the Champions Trophy final against India. And he was dismissed, only for the umpires to check for a no-ball (in the days when they did that) and for the decision to be reversed.

Cricketers have all sorts of dreams the night before games. The mind wanders, many players struggle to sleep knowing there is a game starting the next day. And of course, we only remember the things that come true.

But even so, the next day Fakhar Zaman’s dream came true. So did Pakistan’s.

Pakistan turned up on time, and all their players remembered to wear green. That's all the positives covered.

I wrote that after I watched one of the worst performances ever. Pakistan’s last Champions trophy started with a nightmare.

Pakistan entered with a flawed theory that didn’t make sense — even when it technically worked. They dropped routine catches, bowled garbage, fumbled straightforward fielding chances, and made desperate tactical adjustments on the fly. Their supposedly fearsome fast bowler was just ineffective; their most in-form bowler limped off with cramps on a cold, rain-interrupted day, and they shattered the confidence of their usually economical spinner by making him bowl at the death in the wet. Their team selections defied cricketing logic: two key players were absent due to corruption, their running between the wickets was dreadful, and the only thing consistent about their batting was how slow both their running and scoring were. Any attacking shot they attempted was reckless and ill-advised, and the highlights of their match were either lucky wickets or moments when the ball simply went missing.

It was one of the worst displays I’ve ever had the displeasure of sitting through. Had Pakistan's players been replaced by cardboard cutouts, the result would have been more or less the same.

That was the first game of the 2017 Champions Trophy. A tournament that Pakistan won.

Their second match was against South Africa. Again, it rained, but this time not on Pakistan. An all-star South African line up of Quinton de Kock, Hashim Amla, Faf du Plessis, AB de Villiers and David Miller stumbled to 219, finding it impossible to score a run off Imad Wasim. Meanwhile, Hasan Ali ripped out their middle.

When Pakistan batted, Morne Morkel caused some issues, but no one else did. When the rain came, Pakistan were well above the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern par score. They won easily, but probably would have even without the rain.

In the next match, they went up against Sri Lanka. Hasan Ali starred again, He was at his best in the middle overs. Historically, this is when Pakistan are at their best. They had worked out how to use their seamers in the middle, and they were causing problems.

Then Fakhar Zaman came in, and slapped the ball everywhere, almost ending the game pretty quickly. Not bad for a bloke in his second ODI. But Pakistan still tried to give it away before Sarfaraz Ahmed had to partner with Mohammad Amir to get them over the line.

And that’s all they needed, those two wins, and they were in the semi-finals.

The semi-final was one of the more hilarious matches I’ve covered. England had to bat on a slow wicket, and because of that, some English people complained that the ICC had fixed the pitch to make it slower. The truth was that the wicket had been overused, and was in no fit state for an ICC semifinal.

But England were 52/1 after ten, doing quite okay at the start. However, as the balls got older, Pakistan used all three of their spinners, and England got stuck. At the halfway point they were 118/2. A couple of overs later Root was out to Shadab, and then Hasan Ali did his thing again with Eoin Morgan to really kill England.

The spinners kept them quiet, but the quicks took the wickets.

Then on a wicket where it was supposedly really hard to score on, Fakhar Zaman peeled off a run-a-ball 57, while Azhar Ali and Babar Azam anchored around him. They seemed to have no issue with the spin duo of Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid. But they also crushed Mark Wood, Liam Plunkett and Ben Stokes. There really wasn’t a moment in the chase when Pakistan weren’t in control. They won with eight wickets in hand and 12.5 overs left.

Remember, England were in the middle of changing ODI cricket forever, and yes, it was still a little rough at that point. But they were a legit team, and yet it was Pakistan who outbowled and then outhit them.

In a tournament that was once a knockout, and is still pretty close to it, Pakistan had a bye in the first game and still made it to the final.

But here they had to go up against the team from the first game, who didn’t have scars of losing lots of tournaments at this point, and who had a fairly repeatable formula of knocking the ball around at the top until they were 150/1ish, and then doubling it. India were leaving runs on the table for consistency, and it had stung them once earlier in the tournament when Sri Lanka chased down their total.

So now the ICC had the India vs Pakistan final, and Fakhar Zaman was at the crease, not in a dream, but real life. And he faced a pre-legend version of Jasprit Bumrah, who angled one across him and took an edge behind. And then just as was prophesied, the umpires had a second look, and Fakhar’s dream was a reality as the foot was over the line.

Fakhar celebrated by hitting a boundary next ball. In total, Bumrah’s over went for 12. He doesn’t often go for that much at the death in T20s. Then Pakistan played sensible, professional cricket, and it was India who were rattled. They bowled lots of wides and Pakistan batted like India usually did, cool and within themselves. India delivered six wides and a no-ball in the first eight overs.

Pakistan are 103 without loss after 19 overs. Fakhar Zaman has 42 from 56, and Hardik Pandya’s over has just gone for three runs. In the following 14 overs, they add another 97 runs for the loss of Azhar Ali, while Fakhar scores 72 from 49. Had Sharjeel Khan been available, Fakhar may not have even been in the squad. And even then, he wasn’t even in the team for the first game. Now in his fourth ODI, he has a hundred in an ICC final.

Pakistan get stuck a little before one of the most polarising cricketers, Mohammad Hafeez, comes in and smashes 57 from 37 balls. Hafeez had a career strike rate of 76 in 248 matches. This was the only time he scored 50 runs at a strike rate of more than 140. Actually, this was his quickest innings ever, because it was also his fastest-ever innings when scoring more than ten runs. Pakistan fans call this Hafeez 3.0. But this was really the peak of it. A singular explosion, the likes of which he never touched again.

First ball: four. Fourth ball: four. Seventh ball: four. Fifteenth ball: four. Eighteenth ball: six. Maybe this is the dream, because if Mohammad Hafeez ever batted like this before, it was surely tucked under a blanket.

At one stage the ball hit the stumps, the bail coughed up, the ball flew a mile, but the spigots fell back into place and he was not out. This must be a dream, even the bails are supporting Pakistan.

India were so confused by this once-in-a-lifetime knock that they didn’t bowl out Bumrah, and had Kedar Jadav’s underarm (almost) slingers at the death. R Ashwin and Bumrah both went at seven runs an over or more, while Ravindra Jadeja went at above eight.

Mohammad Amir is bowling to Rohit Sharma, and behind him are 338 runs. Rohit could score roughly 264 of them on his own. Instead he and the rest of India’s top three – the most automatic in history – are gone. From the start of 2013 until the end of 2019, these guys averaged 53 runs per wicket as a group: 10 more than the next highest. So they were starting games with India 159/3, when the next best was 129/3. This time it was 33/3, and it was game over. There were reviews, Shadab Khan’s wicket of Yuvraj Singh, and Hardik’s one-man play. But it was over.

Hasan Ali has been their saviour in this tournament, and by the time he got his first wicket, the match was done.

Somehow, the entire narrative had been flipped. The nightmare side of the first game had become the dream team in the space of five games. Or maybe none of this was real, and we were all just non-playing characters in Fakhar Zaman’s Champions Trophy fever dream.