da luck： A batsmen with all the talent in the world looked to be producing his defining innings until that Ben Stokes bouncer

da pinnacle： Osman Samiuddin at Lord's25-May-2018Ask a Pakistani to name his favourite – – delivery and you won’t have enough hours in a day, days in a year, or years in a lifetime.Don’t kid yourself and think it’s just wickets either. We’re talking subsets here, some of them incredibly niche. Favourite Akram/Waqar yorker, most vicious Shoaib bouncer, the best Asif ball to not get a wicket, the best wicket taken by the most obscure pacer, the Amir ball that broke most hearts, the best googly-as-a-fast-ball, the best ball Imran bowled in the 70s with his shirt open down to his sternum.Basically, it’s fast-bowling porn.Ask a Pakistani to do the same for batting and you could be done with the conversation in the time it took you to get to this point in the piece, having made a cup of tea in the process. That’s probably an exaggeration, but only a slight one, and there are genres sure, like the Zaheer Abbas cover drive, or the Inzamam cut, or the Younis sweep. But it isn’t densely populated.It isn’t because there aren’t that many to recall. It’s just that the hardwiring is to fetishize the bowling.So when Babar Azam comes along and starts spreading the kind of love he’s clearly born to spread, well, the brain and heart get together and start logging.There was plenty in his 68 today that will be fairly easy to recall for the next few days. Right from that first cut off Dominic Bess that was so late it made Pakistani weddings look punctual, to a pull off Mark Wood that was a mic-drop, this was Babar singlehandedly trying to fill this vast black hole of the Pakistani memory.But the shots that are forever – and you know which ones they are – came in successive Jimmy Anderson overs not long after lunch. He’d been dropped at slip when two balls later he leaned upwards from his stance, stood tall and lithe, on the back foot, and call it a punch but it was actually a simple assertion of a regal right to rule over that specific contest.

Babar’s first cut off Dominic Bess was so late it made Pakistani weddings look punctual

Remember Neo in that moment in when the code finally clicked and he understood and made those bullets drop? It was emphatic in that way. This was Anderson, from the Nursery End at Lord’s, where he’s played nine more Tests than Babar has in his entire career, under clouds with a ball that refused to stop doing something.And Anderson was bowling well. And these weren’t full balls to drive. Pakistan were still behind and Babar hadn’t even been in that long. And in the next over, he did it again like it was nothing.Two years ago Pakistan played an ODI in New Zealand, the details of which are lost to the memory. The one thing that remained though was a shot Babar played and again, it wasn’t a stroke so much as some gentle encouragement to the ball to be on its way. At first viewing it was innocuous, the delivery directed from off and middle towards midwicket. A single if he got the placement right, likelier a dot ball. Until you realised it was speeding off to the right of short midwicket and to the boundary, a near-perfect commingling of timing, balance, placement and many other things we can only pretend to understand.Usually the memories might be enough, but in propping up a Test career average of 28, they won’t be. Why and how has he had the Test career that he has had? Watching him play, it’s difficult to find a glaring shortcoming (other than this, which is not so much about the mechanics of his batting) and perhaps a broader issue against spin, which accounts for eight of his 21 Test dismissals.Otherwise he’s not a strong LBW candidate – the preternatural balance helps that – as only two such dismissals suggest. He’s been bowled thrice. He’s been caught in the slips but he’s generally a leaver. To pace he leaves, on average, 25% of deliveries and today, he didn’t offer a shot to 19 of the 71 balls from pace. He knows, you would think then, where his off stump is. Six times in his Test career he’s either played on or been caught off an inside-edge which… pinpoints nothing really.Mickey Arthur loves Babar’s work ethic and says he has incredible drive, and given Arthur shows little leeway in these matters that says something. Nor does he seem to be an especially difficult character which, as we’re talking the Akmal clan here, is quite something.If it wasn’t complicated enough, two of his best Test innings have come in conditions that were pretty complicated for batsmen. Yet between that unbeaten 90 in Hamilton and this 68 is this great big, sprawling drought, including five ducks last year, and why nobody can really say. With so much inexplicability already, is there any need to delve into what the contrast with his white-ball career might say? No.But if poignancy adds to the exercise of memory, then it’ll be impossible to forget this, arguably his most accomplished Test innings to date. And that it came a week or so after he played a critical part in seeing Pakistan through a tricky low chase in Malahide – a rite of passage if ever there was one. Is it possible that he could have been, just before that fierce Ben Stokes bouncer broke a bone, on the verge of figuring it out?