Flintoff, Thorpe author a great English win

By Ted Corbett

KARACHI, OCT. 25. One of the most extraordinary one-day Internationals finished with victory by five wickets for England at the National Stadium on Tuesday night. Only three teams in the 29 years of such matches have scored more than the 305 England needed to win.

Pakistan took four hours to bowl 47 overs and the game finished 40 minutes later than scheduled. The Sind heat, plus the lights reduced even the fittest to walking pace in the airless built-up bowl and match referee Barrie Jarman will have to decide if the tardy pace was justified. Certainly this game was less like the one-dayer of popular legend than any of the 1,644 games that have gone before.

At no time in the second innings were 12 overs bowled in an hour, five minutes were allowed for each of the three drinks breaks while dew was mechanically sucked from the turf and, as if 35,000 spectators were not enough, half a dozen youths danced on the roof of the biggest stand, one slip from a dreadful fall.

When the crawl of a second innings began, Alec Stewart was given out off the fourth ball in a manner that angered almost every Test cricketer on the ground. Stewart was drawn into a rash shot outside the off stump, umpire Riazuddin took three seconds to raise a finger and Stewart, furious, dropped his bat.

Wasim Akram came late to the appeal and there were accusations that Riazuddin, Pakistan's best umpire with ICC approval, allowed himself to be coerced into his verdict. England has wasted little time in falling out with the umpires; it is an old argument in this country and it will not help their cause.

The rest of the England innings belonged to Graeme Hick with 56 off 52 balls, Nasser Hussain with 73 off 99 balls, the nudge and run expert Graham Thorpe - whose name never appeared on the worst scoreboard I have ever seen - and Andrew Flintoff who reached fifty in 39 balls.

Flintoff's personal best of 84 off 59 balls guided England to a high class win in the first of three one-day games and showed that in spirit, at any rate, it is unrecogniseable from the side which was hustled out of the World Cup only 15 months ago.

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