If you really thought Pakistan could beat India, you are Shahid Afridi

‘We hate Afridi now, but we think we can beat India’. That was the Snapchat explanation of Pakistan cricket right before their match against India.

No fans love like Pakistan, no fans hate like Pakistan. If that isn’t special enough, it’s the ability to do both at once, for prolonged periods of time, while changing what it is you love and hate, and still feeling as passionate as you did the first time, that is truly staggering.

Being a fan of Pakistani cricket is like doing moral gymnastics.

Then there is Shahid Afridi, who is praised for things he has yet to do, screamed at for things he simply cannot do, and yet again, often at the same time.

His captaincy in the India game was hard to support. If Afridi was a golfer (think Happy Gilmore but with more energy) he would have left most of his clubs in his bag this round.

How you could see that pitch, or the game two nights earlier, and think you need four seam bowlers? That is not to say the pitch was easy to play seamers on, it’s just that four, four, did they mistake the wicket for the WACA? In their minds had they travelled back to Sabina Park in 1976?

Then his actual bowling.

He started around the wicket to the left handers on a pitch that was spinning like a drunk ballerina. One ball spun so far Sarfraz Ahmed had to dive just to take it. From over the wicket, he would have been like an unplayable monster of doom, from around the wicket, he was bowling wides. He kept it tight, he bowled ok later on, but he was the only bowler he used all four overs of.

He didn’t bowl out his number one strike bowler who’d returned from exile like a man trying to make up for all his past wrongdoings and went for 11 runs in three overs. He didn’t bowl out his enforcer who has the ability in two balls to put a dent in any batting order. Nor the man who took two wickets in an over that made India dream of past failures