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There weren't supposed to be three rows.

Younis Khan's gesticulations had made t


hat obvious. Shan Masood thus had to move up to the second row, and so he steppe
d up, forcing the little man to move to the edge of that row. There, on the peri
phery of the formation, he stood, away from the cameras, never likely to be the
centre of attention. The push-ups and the salute that followed transcended sport
like few things in recent Pakistani history. Yet the photos that would grace th
e newspaper and Facebook posts in the days to come would cut him out altogether.
The match would be remembered for Misbah's salute, Yasir's ten-fer, Amir's retu
rn, Bairstow's resistance and Pakistan's push-ups. In the midst of it all, in th
e outpouring of exuberance that followed, the little man who wasn't in the photo
had just ended the Test having scored more runs than anyone on either side. Eve
n as the hero, he was reduced to being a sidekick. It was an apt summary of Asad
Shafiq's career.
In the winter of 2009-10, Pakistan went to Australia, for what would eventually
become arguably the worst tour Pakistan have had in modern times. The results ta
lly across all three formats at the end of it read: played 9, lost 9. The only r
eason I say arguably is due to what ended up happening in England the following
summer.
Whilst all this was going on, as the first season without international cricket
at home became a reality, Pakistan had the latest iteration of the Quaid-e-Azam
Trophy taking place. The premier first-class competition in the land had not see
n a single player reach the 1000-run mark since Younis Khan had crossed that bar
rier in the 1999-2000 season which also led to his Test debut. Of course that re
cord had something to do with PCB's constant tinkering of the tournament too, wi
th a couple of seasons in the middle of the decade having as few as 6 first-clas
s matches for a team in the season. But the format and number had mostly remaine
d constant, and yet only one player had even scored over 950 runs in a season Misbah-ul-Haq in 2002-03 - let alone challenge the 1000-run mark. The Quaid-e-Az
am Trophy, in effect, was a reflection of the paucity and decline of the state o
f Pakistani batting in this century.
Four of his nine hundreds have come with Pakistan four down for under a hundred
runs on the board. And of the twenty four 50-plus scores he's had in his career,
13 have come with the team's score under 160 when he walks in.
In the midst of the nadir of Pakistani cricket, there emerged a glimmer of hope.
The 2009-10 season of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy saw Asad Shafiq score 1104 runs,
the most in a season for 20 years, as his Karachi Blues team won the championshi
p.
Yet it would still take several months before Shafiq would make his Test debut.
But, in his mind, it was something of a blessing. After averaging 58 in his debu
t season, just two years before his record-breaking winter, Shafiq had averaged
just 21 in his second season. And many, perhaps including him, weren't sure if h
e was anything more than a one-season wonder. "After a good debut season, I had
had a bad second season, and started having doubts," he says. "If you don't perf
orm at first-class level, your cricket starts fading away. So not being included
immediately, or during that season helped me, because I was still learning at t
he time." It wasn't just on the field that he was learning though. After the sub
-par second season, he had even reconsidered his cricket future, but, he says, h
is mother and brothers backed him through the worst of times, and allowed him to
recover as quickly as he did. It's a story familiar to observers of Pakistani c
ricket, the influence of the immediate family plays an incalculably big role in
the careers of cricketers here.
Of course, everything since then has been atypical. In a land where your interna
tional debut is no guarantee of having even a short-term career, Shafiq has been

an ever-present. In just the second Test of the post spot-fixing era, he made a
debut fifty against Steyn et al. Since then he has only missed a single Test (a
gainst Zimbabwe in 2011) in 46, as Pakistan have forged an identity around a mid
dle-order comprising players from bygone eras. That isn't something he was ever
expecting to experience. "I couldn't even dream of playing as much as I have don
e," he says when talking about his Test debut and career. "I didn't think I woul
d even get a chance as early as I did. We still had guys like Mohammad Yousuf an
d Umar Akmal playing in the team at the time, so I thought it would take a while
for me to break through." But an injury to Yousuf meant that one spot in the mi
ddle-order was now open for a straight shootout between him and Umar Akmal.
On the surface, Akmal, who had been playing regularly for a year by then, was ex
pected to retain his spot. But when he was dropped Shafiq grabbed onto his chanc
e. "I had never batted at No. 6 before my Test debut. I thought whenever I play,
it would be as an opener or No. 3, because that's where I had batted throughout
my domestic career. But Misbah bhai and then Waqar bhai sat me down and told me
about their decision to include me in the team and what batting at No. 6 would
entail. I didn't care where I was playing. All that mattered was that I was play
ing a Test for Pakistan. And after that the more I batted at No. 6, the more I l
earnt about that role - how to bat there, when you have to counter attack, and e
specially how one bats with the tail."

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