“I like the coach, Jurgen Klopp.”
Discussing football isn’t the usual place to start a conversation with a Pakistan opening batter, but to know a little bit about Abdullah Shafique is to understand his attraction to Klopp’s Liverpool.
“It is his mentality about coaching and his attitude towards the game,” Shafique tells BBC Sport.
Only seven matches into his Test career, 23-year-old Shafique has shown the sort of characteristics that would fit into the team Klopp likes to call “mentality monsters”.
Averaging nearly 67, the right-hander already possesses two hundreds and four fifties, nade via an old-school approach to opening the batting has his strike-rate down below 40.
Since he made his debut in November of last year, only Joe Root has faced more deliveries in Tests than Shafique – and the England batter has played 15 more innings. Over the course of the three matches scheduled to begin in Rawalpindi on Thursday, England and their supporters may have to get used to watching Shafique bat.
“My nature is I have to fight until the end,” says Shafique. “If I am batting or fielding, I have to stay there and fight. That is my thing.”
These aren’t just words; Shafique has the record to back it up. In an admittedly small sample size of five knocks, he averages 93 in the fourth innings of Tests.
In March he batted almost eight hours for a 96 that denied Australia in Karachi. Even better was his 160 not out, made from 408 deliveries, in a chase of 342 to beat Sri Lanka in Galle in July, one of the all-time great fourth-innings efforts.
As England ponder how to take 20 wickets on flat Pakistani pitches, they may fear they will need a crowbar to prise Shafique from the crease.
It is not that Shafique knows only one way, either.
He shot to prominence as a 20-year-old in his first game of professional T20 cricket. With the TV cameras watching, Shafique crashed 102 not out in Central Punjab’s chase of 201 to beat Southern Punjab.
Debut hundreds weren’t a new thing for Shafique, either. Ten months earlier he’d done the same for Central on his first-class bow.
