KARACHI: Placid, belter, batter’s paradise, slow; such are the characteristics commonly attributed to the National Bank Stadium’s playing surface.

But when Afghanistan came in to bat with a mammoth target of 316 against South Africa in their Champions Trophy match here on Friday, they found themselves in an unknown territory.

With the thousands-strong crowd rooting for them, Afghanistan were hoping the conditions to be favour them, but when a rising Lungi Ngidi delivery climbed on Rahmanullah Gurbaz as the batter failed to negotiate it and became his team’s first casualty, a reality unfolded in front of them.

“To be honest, the pitch was totally against our expectations,” Gurbaz told reporters after Afghan­istan’s loss. “This is the first time I played on a pitch like this in Pakistan, especially in Karachi.

“We are definitely surprised by how the pitch reacted. We were hoping for a slow pitch.”

Gurbaz wasn’t the only Afghanistan batter to be bounced out by a South African pacer. Azmatullah Omarzai met the same fate, trying to hook off his legs a Kagiso Rabada delivery.

Veteran Afghanistan all-rounder Mohammad Nabi was rushed on the pull by Marco Jansen as the lanky left-armer bowled a short­ish ball around chest-height to get his only wicket.

Not only the short balls, but the ones pitched on length too did a bit when Rabada castled Ibrahim Zadran with a 148kph inswinger and when Ngidi uprooted Noor Ahmed’s off-stump later on.

It wasn’t only the Afgha­n­istan batters who were caught by surprise by the pitch.

Even the South African bowlers, who had been gathering all the data about the surfaces at the venues, having played a tri-nation series match and a warm-up ahead of the Champions Trophy, didn’t expect this kind of help on a breezy Friday night.

“In the tri-series and the warm-up games, the pitches weren’t like that,” the Proteas’ fast bowler Wiaan Mulder told reporters. “It was not something we expected to be honest.”

South Africa batting first after winning the toss helped them observe that the pitch was gradually becoming pace friendly as the day went on, Mulder revealed.

“It took us all by surprise, and it was more towards the conditions we get in South Africa,” he noted. “It was still a bit of Karachi though as it stayed low every now and then.”

South African opener Ryan Rickelton said he found the pitch quick in general through most part of his innings, despite the surface being expectedly dry.

“I think the wicket had pace in it, no doubt about it, but the variability in the bounce made it even more trickier,” said the left-han­der, adding that in comparison to the Afghanistan pacers, their South African counterparts had the “ext­ra yards and extra heights to extract more out of the pitch”.

While Afghanistan, as Gurbaz admitted in his mixed zone talk after the match, felt at home due to the presence of a good number of supporters in the stands, South Africa found the conditions on the pitch homely, and that meant more in the end.

Published in Dawn, February 22nd, 2025