Close calls all evening, yet Pakistan find their way through

It was a very unusual day at the Asia Cup. For a while, it felt like there wouldn't be any cricket in Dubai at all. And when it finally did happen, an hour late, the UAE looked the likelier side to progress to the Super Fours, despite the groups seemingly designed to guarantee at least two India-Pakistan matches.

A late afternoon that began with the possibility of not seeing Pakistan again in this Asia Cup slowly aged into an evening that carried the same fear, only to end with the promise of more Pakistan, and the certainty of another India-Pakistan clash on September 21.

It was a close shave on and off the field. The Pakistan team spent the afternoon in their hotel, waiting for clearance from Lahore, bags packed and breath held. Hours later, their coach Mike Hesson would wear the same look in the dugout when his team were 114 for 7 with 13 balls left in the innings. All that after Salman Ali Agha, who lost the toss, revealed Pakistan had wanted to bat first anyway. Shaheen Afridi's 29* off 14 balls took them to 146, a score that felt, at best, short of par with the dew around.

That the margin of victory doesn't reflect how much of the game UAE controlled says enough. They could have had a wicket second ball, only for ball-tracking to overturn the on-field call against Sahibzada Farhan. Muhammad Rohid Khan bowled with pace and bounce, regularly beating the outside edge. Another day, those moments would've swung differently.

Junaid Siddique's second successive four-fer had Pakistan wobbling, but Fakhar Zaman's 13th T20I fifty held the innings together. It was a gritty negotiation, reminiscent of the scene earlier in the day when head coach Mike Hesson, captain Salman Agha and team manager Naveed Cheema sat down with match referee Andy Pycroft to face the elephant in the room. That meeting, shot on video but shared without the audio, still set the stage for Pakistan's bowling to find its voice later in the night, when they scythed through UAE with six wickets for 20 runs.

Two of those came from Haris Rauf, overlooked in Pakistan's first two games despite being their leading wicket-taker in T20Is. He had spent days bowling in the nets, uncertainty becoming his conditioning. So an hour of chaos before the game was hardly going to unsettle him.

"See, I wasn't feeling any pressure. Because these things are not in my control," Haris said afterwards. "These are the decisions of the board, this is a headache for them and they can manage it well. My focus was only on the match. The rest of the things outside of it, management knows better and they have tackled it really well.

"And yes, it's never easy for a player to sit out. But at the end, you see what the team needs. They played the team according to their requirements, my job is to back the team. There are a lot of young players in this team. As a senior player, the more you back them, the more confidence you give them. They did a good job.

"We won the tri-nation series with spinners. The spinners are becoming more effective. All the teams are doing the same. It is the job of the management. I wait for the opportunity. I am with the team. It is important to be with the team."

Simranjeet Singh, the left-arm spinner on the other side, bowled superbly through the middle overs, even removing Fakhar with a soft dismissal. But Shaheen's late swings of the bat fetched 18 runs in the last over, Pakistan's biggest burst of the innings, and ultimately the difference. A late adjustment, much like their practice session, which only began at 6:25 pm, five minutes before the scheduled start. The PCB's standoff with the ICC had held them back; the match was delayed an hour.

UAE, though, were ready. They arrived by 5:00pm, warmed up as if nothing was uncertain and played like it too.

"Did you see our bowling and warm-up? It didn't matter to us whether we were delayed or not," UAE captain Muhammad Waseem asked at the post-match press conference. "You saw our bowling, you saw our effort. We weren't talking about that [delay]. We came normally, did the warm-up our coach and trainer gave us, and we played the match. That's it."

For Pakistan, amidst the noise, the eventual win owed plenty to their fielding. They dived around to save runs, and Mohammad Nawaz, quiet with the ball this tournament, came alive at point, sprinting back to take a stunning catch to dismiss Waseem just minutes after the UAE captain had become the highest T20I run-getter among batters from Associate Nations.

In the end, Pakistan clung on. Their 146 for 9 is now the third-lowest total successfully defended in the Asia Cup. Shaheen, on a day he made all the difference with the bat, even picked his first PowerPlay wicket of the tournament. Belated, yes, but timely.

That might well be the story of Pakistan at this Asia Cup: arriving late, in installments, but arriving all the same. The real test comes when they meet India again.