From 154/9 to 242: Shadab Khan and Haris Rauf Script a Last-Wicket Record in Lahore

The winning run did not produce a single roar in Lahore. First the ground inhaled — that small, uncertain pause — and then the noise arrived. Sitting on this side of the commentary feed, I was hearing the same sequence my pocket notebook has recorded since 2026: ball on bat, three seconds of nothing, then thirty thousand throats. In Block B, the noise arrives before the ball does; in Lahore it came before the ball and kept returning long after the last run.

Haris Rauf was unbeaten on 7. A No. 11, the kind of batter everyone expects to last two overs at most. At the other end stood Shadab Khan — 113 off 96 balls, a maiden ODI hundred. The score read 154/9, the target 242: 88 runs and one wicket left. The England dressing room knew the match was in its fist. That is the most dangerous minute in cricket.

Years ago, in a Bangalore press box with sixty seats and two women in it, I made a rule: never write ‘the crowd fell silent’ until you can name who was standing where. In this match I was on the other side of the rule, watching the feed, hearing again that the volume of noise and the truth of the scoreboard are two different things.

This was a tri-series ODI involving Pakistan, England and Sri Lanka, and for England in Lahore it was win-or-out. Having lost the first two games, there was no arithmetic left. England batted first and slid to 19/3, Shaheen Shah Afridi cutting through the top order on his way to 4 for 46. Ben Duckett’s 105 off 111 carried the innings to 241, with Razaullah taking 2 for 38.

The pitch was described as batting-friendly. That sentence travels through every report, and I never record it as given. If the surface was good for batting and a side still reached only 241 after being 19/3 — what exactly was 241? A score, or a compromise?

Pakistan’s chase lost its top three inside the powerplay and sank to 154/9. From there, according to the match report, Shadab and Rauf put on an unbroken 89 — the highest tenth-wicket partnership in a successful ODI chase. Pakistan won by one wicket and moved into the final. I do not have the official scorecard, so I will not write how many balls were left when the winning runs came. What I do not know, I do not dress up.

The real story sits inside those 88 runs. With one wicket in hand, every over split into two separate matches — Shadab’s, in which runs had to be found, and Rauf’s, in which survival was the whole job. England had every bowling option available, a spread field, and needed one ball. Pakistan needed 88 runs’ worth of patience and a batter capable of 113 off 96 — a strike rate of 117.7.

A No. 8 century is rare in ODI cricket; in a chase, with nine wickets gone, it moves into the near-impossible category. What stood out in Shadab’s innings was the absence of panic. He rotated strike, found gaps, and when the short ball came he chose the pull — taking risk, but risk with arithmetic behind it. A lower-order hundred is usually described as a storm; this one was water that simply kept flowing.

Rauf’s 7 is not a statistic but an event. He defended, ducked and weaved — he understood that his job was not to score but to keep Shadab at the other end. When he hit the winning runs, his name entered the record books; the true value of his innings lies in the balls he chose not to play at.

England’s question is different. Duckett’s hundred was solid — 105 off 111, a strike rate of 94.6. On a batting-friendly pitch, recovering from 19/3, a knock at 110-115 would have put another 15 to 20 runs on the board. England did not lose this match in the last over; they lost it in the middle overs, where 241 was allowed to remain ‘fine’ instead of becoming 260 and ‘safe’. Pressure changes only when the scoreboard speaks. 241 never spoke.

One note on Shaheen’s captaincy. The 4 for 46 is clean, but he had to return in the middle overs as well as take the new ball. Captain and frontline fast bowler in the same body is an open risk deep in a tournament. In 2026, calling sixty matches into empty stadiums, I learned that a bowler’s fatigue is audible even in silence — you just have to switch off the mic to hear it.

A record is cricket’s museum, not its blueprint. That 89-run stand is the highest for the tenth wicket in a successful ODI chase and it will stay in the book. Treating it as a template for the next match is exactly the mistake every ‘miracle’ invites.

Which is why the word miracle makes me pause. Calling it a miracle quietly pardons the process. Pakistan’s top three were gone inside the powerplay — that is not a one-off accident but a habit of their chase structure. Before the final, this is the question that matters: can they avoid ever reaching 154/9? If the answer is no, the celebration is incomplete.

The second counter-intuitive point concerns England. To defend from 154/9, one good ball was enough — and a major white-ball side had the resources to bowl it. This cannot be filed entirely under ‘Pakistan’s greatness’; half of it belongs to England’s freeze under pressure, the moment a plan gets abandoned. I keep a rule for every contrarian claim: if I cannot put it in front of a data desk or a coach who disagrees, it is a mood, not an argument. Here the numbers are plain — 19/3, 241, 154/9, 89, one wicket.

For Shadab, this is the brightest single unit of his career, but one innings does not decide a promotion in the batting order. Five matches of data will decide that, not one evening of adrenaline.

Lahore’s evening now belongs to the record books. Whether Pakistan’s top order changes for the final will be answered by selection, not by miracles. Thirty-three thousand voices can make one person feel found, but they cannot repair a top-order technique. Rauf’s raised arms will freeze as the image of this match; the real examination begins after the photograph.