In which an old cliché proves remarkably accurate

All right, so I may have intimated in my last post that there wasn't anything particularly stormy about a match that a lot of people were talking about using words like 'revenge' and 'explosive' before the teams had even landed in the U.A.E. This, of course, because New Zealand beat Pakistan in the semifinals of the Champions' Trophy exactly a month ago today, and the press do love a good grudge match, especially when it involves Pakistan, those tempestuous, volatile firebrands who are always ready to oblige with some kind of drama on a slow news day. Besides, as it turned out, New Zealand came close to matching them for pre-series ructions this time, countering Pakistan's resigned-then-reinstated captain with one abruptly resigned coach and a captain now juggling yet another addition to an already outsize list of responsibilities. For the record, Daniel Vettori is now national selector, 'unofficial' head coach, captain, leading spin bowler and lower-order bailer-out when his specialist batsmen implode spectacularly, which these days seems to be just about every time they play.

Meet Dan. He looks like this a lot. I imagine he is also very tired a lot. Just a guess.

And this, bearing in mind that most players can't take on, say, wicketkeeping without their batting going down the crapper, and all-rounders are practically mythical in the modern game. It seems only logical that his name lends itself so neatly to the nickname 'SuperDan.'

But when he saves the day, the glasses stay on.

In New Zealand's defense, they have a long and honourable tradition of setting low expectations and then promptly exceeding them when it really matters. Case-in-point: the Champions' Trophy, where their stellar performance almost managed to make everyone forget about the dire tour of Sri Lanka that immediately preceded it. So it was a bit of a shock, but not entirely unexpected, when Shane Bond, the reinstated prodigal son (and a legend in his own right) had the first two Pakistani batsmen caught behind for no score, followed swiftly by relative unknown Martin Guptill engineering the runout of the dangerous Mohammad Yousef off a direct hit. Pakistan's run-rate had slowed to a crawl to boot, and suddenly Younis Khan's confident assertion at the toss that his team would consider 280 a satisfactory score looked faintly ludicrous.

Silly me. I should have remembered.

My father says it constantly, and he's hardly the only one. It's said so often that it's actually incredibly easy to forget how true it is: 'In cricket, anything can happen.'

Fast-forward to the 30-over mark, and Boom-Boom Afridi was doing what he does best, which is to hit cricket balls very high and very far. When he went, miscuing an improvised paddle-type shot to Jacob Oram at short fine-leg, he had scored 70 off just 50 deliveries and kicked the floodgates wide open.

Skip ahead a bit more to the end of the innings, and Pakistan had in fact scored 287, not 280.

...yeah.