We gave Bishoo eight soft wickets: Mickey Arthur

As Devendra Bishoo was making his way to his eight-wicket haul, a livid Mickey Arthur watched from the dressing sheds as his batsmen fell to the spin of Bishoo. This happens to be Bishoo’s best figures in Test cricket as the tables well and truly turned with 16 wickets falling on the fourth day’s play in Dubai. Arthur has been the architect of Pakistan’s impressive ascend in cricket thus far. They also stayed on the top of the rankings for a substantial amount of time before being dethroned by India.

Mickey Arthur believed that his batsmen capitulated and went on to add that most of the dismissals were ‘soft dismissals’. He also added that this is not the way the Pakistanis would want to play the game from an ideal standpoint.

“I am not going to take anything away from the way Bishoo bowled because he bowled really, really well,” Arthur said. “I thought we gave him eight soft wickets. We were cutting against the spin, some lazy shots. That is something we have spoken hard about because that’s not how we play the game. We worked so hard to get ourselves in front of the game and then in one session we lost 6 for 11 and that gave West Indies a sniff. We want to be better than that. We want to be a team that closes the opposition out when we get the opportunity and we didn’t.

“And the message was very simple: we wanted a score of 180 in 45-50 overs. We felt that would have given us 25-30 overs tonight and a full day tomorrow. So we were looking at 180 in probably 45 overs at the most and we played poorly.”

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Devendra Bishoo also went on to reveal a sliver of his plans whilst bowling to the Pakistani batsmen. The leg-spinner went on to state that he tried to bowl straighter and target the stumps more than attempting to get the batsman play the cover drive and edging the ball to the slips or the keeper.

“Last evening I spent some time thinking about how I had bowled in the first innings and I was bowling most likely fourth-fifth stump and they were cutting the ball down to cover for a single all the time,” Bishoo said. “So I tried to bowl straighter on the stumps. I expected the ball to spin more on the fourth and the fifth days, and that’s exactly what happened. I used the rough a little and I tried to use the crease a bit more and tried to bowl more on the stumps.”

Arthur then went on to commend the West Indies batsmen on their resilience in spite of stating his obvious disappointment.  “We’ve batted really well, certainly through the Test matches in England, I thought we were excellent and we were brilliant in the first innings here. So that is something we are trying to eradicate. We want to get this completely out of our game. Consistency is something we need to keep working on, we are talking long and hard about it.

“We were disappointed that we took our foot off their throat and gave them a glimpse into the game when we should have put them out of it. Because what that would have done for our spinners tomorrow is it would have allowed us to have close catchers for longer. So tonight we have a man at sweeper and we haven’t got a silly point to Bravo and that’s simply because the game is getting closer.”

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