Like blindly following the recipe book for an exotic dish, it was hard to say what Naseem Shah was cooking up at first this morning. He began groggily, throwing the ball up in search of swing as if this was a Rawalpindi winter day and not a Centurion summer one. He barely broached 135kph, and was much too wide, so any away movement only meant an extra lunge for Mohammad Rizwan. If something was brewing, it was difficult to tell what that might have been.
But it was that kind of morning session, a bowling effort on psychedelics, balls just floating into the ether, hovering there briefly as if the laws of gravity had briefly been suspended, and barely kissing the surface before dancing away into the wind. On a pitch where banging…