Safety-first approach, brittle batting: Why Pakistan froze before India’s ingenuity

Colombo, Sunday night: the Premadasa’s floodlights were still warming when the contest everyone had circled on their calendars fizzled into a one-sided tutorial. Pakistan, armed with spinners who have lived on these slow Sri Lankan strips since the start of the World Cup and boasting the mystery of Usman Tariq—24 consecutive T20 wickets at an economy of 5.93—never turned up with the daring required to trouble India. Instead, a safety-first toss call, a misfiring spearhead and a batting order allergic to risk combined to produce a meek surrender long before the equation turned mathematical.

The first domino fell at the coin flip. Salman Agha opted to field, a decision that stunned even India’s dressing room and drew instant rebuke from R Ashwin on his YouTube show: “That’s where they lost half the game.” The logic appeared sound—Colombo’s surface slows and grips as the night wears on—but it ignored Pakistan’s own evidence: only days earlier they had scrapped to 147 against the Netherlands and still needed late fireworks to get home. If 147 felt like 180, chasing 175 against an Indian attack that rarely dips below 160 on its worst batting day was always going to ask for miracles.

Coach Mike Hesson defended the call, insisting the pitch “didn’t slow down and spun less in the second innings,” and instead pinned the early damage on Ishan Kishan’s assault and India’s new-ball precision. Yet the scoreboard told a simpler story: Jasprit Bumrah and Hardik Pandya’s combined five overs cost 33 and delivered four wickets; Shaheen Afridi’s two overs leaked 31. On a sluggish deck where hard-length cutters and change-ups are currency, Afridi kept searching for swing that never arrived. Ashwin’s diagnosis was blunt: “He cannot bowl the hard length consistently on a pitch like this.”

With the ball neutralised, Pakistan’s brittle batting was exposed under a climbing asking rate. The innings never found a heartbeat; boundaries were rationed, singles milked without intent, and when the boundary riders were finally cleared, the required rate had ballooned beyond reach. Ramiz Raja, dissecting the collapse on his show, labelled the approach “slam-bang without the bang,” lamenting that no batter was willing to “take the game deep” and follow the template India themselves used—wickets in hand, spin denied, carnage at the death.

The numbers stack cruelly: three straight Asia Cup defeats to India now, each following the same script—timid starts, mid-inertia, a late scramble that only flatters the scorecard. For a fan base that still remembers the mid-80s to early-2000s era when Pakistan dominated every bilateral skirmish outside World Cups, Sunday’s freeze felt like déjà vu without the occasional upset that kept hope alive.

Yet the tournament is not over. Pakistan can still reach the Super-8s by beating Namibia on Wednesday and, if they progress, will remain in Colombo where their tweakers know every foothold and scuff mark. The players will cling to that lifeline; the supporters will pray the next opposition is not India, and that somewhere in the dressing room a voice finally demands more than a safety-first shrug.