The 34 at Rawalpindi and the Empty Column in My Notebook: An Incomplete Report on Babar Azam's 'Weaknesses'

Rawalpindi, October 20. Babar Azam out for 34. In my notebook, every innings carries three columns beside it — balls faced, strike rate, mode of dismissal. All three are blank against this one. The report that reached me said only 34. No balls, no strike rate, no year. For forty-three years I have stood at the corner of the ground where you can see a batsman's feet and not the scoreboard, and I have been trained to believe that what is not written down also speaks. This time, what was left out became the foundation of a national argument.

The setting is a triangular ODI tournament hosted by Pakistan, with Sri Lanka and England in the field. Babar made 45 in the opener and 34 on the Rawalpindi strip in the second game. Both times he got a start; both times he did not reach fifty. In that second ODI he was dismissed by England's off-spinner Will Jacks. After that, a former Pakistan fast bowler — reported as Tanveer Ahmed — went on television and listed three weaknesses: the front foot going too early against spin, discomfort against the ball coming in, and trouble against the short ball. He added the line that you cannot score runs carrying three weaknesses. The Times of India carried it as news, and by the next morning the subcontinent had appointed itself examiner of Babar's technique.

I see an old mistake in that argument. In March 2026 at Eden Gardens, with India following on, I began my match report not with the toss but with a net session three days earlier — VVS Laxman had shortened his backlift against anything short. I learned then that technique announces itself at practice, not in the scorecard. I learned something else too: two innings are a dangerous basis for a post-mortem.

Start with the arithmetic. Forty-five and thirty-four make 79 runs at 39.5. That is not a collapse. If a top-order batter's rate of passing fifty sits near forty per cent of innings, the probability of two consecutive innings both falling short is roughly 36 per cent — a coin toss. To call this a decline you need twelve-month rolling data, a distribution of dismissal modes, separate splits against pace and spin. This report contains none of them.

Then the venue. Rawalpindi is among the most batting-friendly surfaces in Pakistan — flat, true bounce, short straight boundaries. A 34 there is a worse outcome than a 34 on a turning track, so the wasted-start charge holds for that one innings. Which is exactly why it is weak evidence: one data point, not a pattern. Both innings were played within days of each other in the same tournament, so conditions, ball age and opposition scouting were broadly constant. That weakens the noise defence slightly, but it also means both innings share any single flaw rather than independently confirming it.

Now the part where I part company with the former bowler. The three weaknesses are probably not three. A right-hander who throws the front foot early, gets trapped by the ball turning or seaming in, and looks uneasy against the short ball is usually displaying one biomechanical pattern: weight going hard forward, hands trailing, no depth left in the crease — no room to play late off the pitch, no room to sway or pull off the back foot. The footwork line in the report, that he moved forward too early, is the actual diagnosis. The other two are symptoms. We used to say on the old desk that it is easy to write down a patient's three complaints and hard to name the one disease.

The strongest piece of evidence is the Jacks dismissal, and the report squandered it. Jacks is an off-spinner; an off-spinner turns the ball into a right-hander. That single delivery simultaneously supports two of the three claims — spin, and the incoming line. If the mode was lbw or bowled, the two weaknesses collapse into one fault line: the front pad exposed to a ball angled at the stumps. But the report never states how he was dismissed. That is a serious reporting gap, and my notebook is stuck on the same empty column.

Fifth, the short-ball charge is the weakest of the three because it changes format. An ODI permits only two short-pitched deliveries an over, and with powerplay field restrictions the bouncer is a low-yield wicket-taking option. The short ball is genuinely exposed in Test cricket, where a sustained barrage with a leg-side field is legal and repeatable. Importing a Test vulnerability into an ODI judgement is a category error. As for age, Babar sits in the late-twenties-to-early-thirties band that is batting's peak. Slumps there are more often workload and format-switching fatigue than decay.

The real question is not Babar's footwork. It is why one batsman's 34 becomes a national debate. When a former bowler counts three weaknesses on television over the gap between 45 and 34, he is describing not one player's technique but the architecture of Pakistan's batting — there is no second match-winner in the middle order for the argument to attach itself to. There is a side-effect nobody counted either: a public three-point blueprint has now been handed to opposing teams for free. None of it was new to professional analysts, but all of it is now in print.

There is a trap laid as well. If Babar's next block of runs comes at Rawalpindi and Lahore on flat decks, it will not answer these questions — it will only measure home advantage. The real examination is away, on slower surfaces, against frontline spin, where an off-spinner is allowed a field outside the powerplay. Until that happens, calling 34 a weakness is premature.

I will not watch the scoreboard in the next series. I will watch the nets. I will watch where Babar's foot goes to the first ball, and whether there is space left in the crease to go back. Not three weaknesses — one habit. And a habit takes one session to change, provided somebody starts counting it. The question is who in Pakistan cricket is doing that counting: the television studio, or the training ground?