Australia v. Pakistan, SCG, 23/01/2004

This game sticks in my mind as one of the funniest one-day batting performances I have ever seen.

But first - it seems that whatever happened to Australia on Friday night, it didn't recur today. It seems that with Michael Clarke in the opening position, we can forget anything about batting woe (though Matty Hayden wasn't entirely convincing, but he did get runs on the board). The only real batting woe last night was 'Will Michael Clarke have enough runs in hand to record a century?'. Pakistan had a shocker with the bat, apart from Inzamam (except he holed out to Clarke from Lehmann, of all people) and Shahid Afridi (stumped charging Lehmann, who it seems 'beat him with flight' - yeah, I'll believe that as soon as I start flighting my offies properly.) To be fair, the air was humid and the pitch was moist, and the ball in these conditions, as expected, moved around a lot. Glenn McGrath once again had figures more appropriate for a test match than a one-day international.

Now to that batting performance. Well, to start off with, Clarke was belting them around the park. That's the 'batting' part. But the 'performance' part was towards the end, when with about 13 or so runs to win, he had to score about 10 of those to reach 100. And there the fun begins. It was hilarious. Punter let a few overs go by so that Clarke could reach the tonne without reaching the required runs first. Clarke was trying to belt the ball to reach the tonne in one shot, and nearly, very nearly got caught in mid on (how that guy dropped it, I don't know.) Then there was the second last over where Clarke could have run 3 if he pushed the running hard enough, but instead ran 2 with 1 to go to the tonne and 2 to go to the total. In the end he managed to hit the ball through a gap to get the last run for him and the total. For a while there it was just so weird and strangely entertaining, and you could hear the crowd cheering everytime Punter let the ball go through or didn't run. I don't think I'll see another performance like this again.

Now to see if the Windies can keep up what they did at Brisbane on the weekend.