Two balls at Melbourne

Pakistan were 24 for two in the ninth over of the 1992 World Cup final, having chosen to bat. Imran Khan came in at number three, aged thirty-nine, in the last match of his career.

He and Javed Miandad then batted for nearly thirty overs.

They had been put there by Derek Pringle, who took Aamer Sohail and Ramiz Raja inside nine overs and finished the day with ten overs, two maidens, 22 runs and three wickets. Those are the best figures anybody produced in the 1992 World Cup final. Nobody has mentioned them since.

The stand that made the total

They added 139 for the third wicket at a shade over three an over. Imran made 72 from 110 balls. Miandad made 58 from 98. Neither hit the ball hard for long stretches and neither was trying to.

It is not a passage of play anyone replays. It is the reason there was a total to defend: Inzamam-ul-Haq made 42 from 35 at the end and Wasim Akram 33 from 18, and Pakistan finished on 249 for six, which in 1992 was a large score in a final.

England’s reply

England lost Ian Botham for a duck in the third over and Alec Stewart in the eighth. Graeme Hick made 17. Graham Gooch, the captain, made 29 and was out in the twenty-first.

Then Neil Fairbrother and Allan Lamb put on 72, and England were 141 for four in the thirty-fifth over needing 109 from ninety-two balls with six wickets standing. Fairbrother was batting with a runner by then, having pulled a muscle on reaching his fifty.

Imran brought Wasim Akram back.

Two balls

The fifth ball of the over came round the wicket to Allan Lamb. It pitched outside leg stump and hit the top of off. Chris Lewis walked out and took guard. The next ball came round the wicket, pitched on middle, and hit off.

141 for four became 141 for six in two deliveries.

England were not finished. Fairbrother batted on to 62 and was out at 180, Dermot Reeve at 183, Phil DeFreitas at 208. They were bowled out for 227 with four balls of the innings unused.

Pakistan won by 22 runs. Imran Khan lifted the trophy in the last match he ever played.

Full scorecard: England v Pakistan, World Cup final, Melbourne Cricket Ground, 25 March 1992 →

What gets remembered

Wasim's figures were 10–0–49–3. He was named player of the match for those two deliveries and a cameo of 33 from 18, a contribution that took, in total, about twenty minutes of a seven-hour day.

The two balls are shown together, always, as a pair. They deserve to be: consecutive deliveries of that quality in a World Cup final are rare enough to earn their own footage.

The 139-run stand that built the total is not shown at all. A partnership constructed at 3.1 an over across two hours by a thirty-nine-year-old and a man playing his sixth World Cup is not a moment, and a final needs a moment.

The other bowlers

Mushtaq Ahmed took three for 41 and bowled Gooch, Hick and Reeve, which is the top of the order and the man holding the middle together. Aaqib Javed went for 27 from ten.

Pakistan won that final with four bowlers who all did their job, and one of them did two things in the space of a minute that fitted on a videotape.

The innings that would have been mocked

Imran made 72 from 110 balls in a fifty-over final. He has never once had to justify the strike rate, because Pakistan won.

The same innings in a losing cause would sit alongside Gavaskar's 36 as a byword for a batter who did not understand the format. Nothing in the record says which passage of play won the World Cup. The card gives equal weight to every ball of it, and memory does not.

••••••

No. 5 in The Over That Turned It, a series of 5.

TomorrowOne over, and the career ends