Pakistan coach Mickey Arthur believes that Sunday’s World Cup game against India presents a glorious opportunity for many of his wards to reiterate their credentials. “I don’t want to say it’s the biggest rivalry in sport, but I saw some stats which said the soccer World Cup final attracted 1.6 billion viewers and tomorrow is likely to get 1.5 billion. It doesn’t get bigger than that. I am telling our players in the dressing room, ‘you do something incredible, you will be remembered forever’,” Arthur told the media here on Saturday.

Arthur felt that if Pakistan performed to potential, it could defeat any opposition: “We haven’t put the perfect game together yet. We have been good with the bat, been okay with the ball and okay in the field. If we put the perfect game together, we can beat everybody, and we are confident of that.”

Inconsistency

The overwhelming theme linked to Pakistan through this World Cup has been its ability to scale stratospheric heights one day and then plumb the depths over the next 24 hours. Arthur, though, stressed that too much is being read into the preceding results: “Through a World Cup, when you are playing nine games, you are not going to win every game. Getting that momentum towards the back-end of the tournament is really important and it’s time we start that.”

Looking back at the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy final in which Mohammad Amir prised out the Indian top-order, Arthur hinted that it is a vulnerability his team would love to exploit: “Without wanting to harp too much, that was two years ago, but when you get into the Indian top-order, you can create a little bit of havoc. That’s something that we will try to work on.”