“All four innings [cost us]” Masood said. “We can only look at ourselves. You’re going to make mistakes over several days, but you need to have a cushion. I thought when it came to a time when we could get that cushion with the bat, first and third innings, or whether that was with the ball when we had them eight down on two occasions. We didn’t have that cushion, and then you get partnerships like Bosch’s innings and Rabada and Jansen, and you don’t have enough of a cushion to retain a winning position.”
“I don’t think it’s a quality issue. The quality is there, and we’ve seen it at various points. To be a top team, to be in South Africa’s place, to play a WTC final, these are the things where you have to be ruthless.
“Sometimes you learn the hard way. You can’t use it as an excuse but the more we play Test cricket, the more people get into sync. A lot of the players were playing for the first time in these conditions. It can be a really hard lesson where you feel like you’ve got the other team under pressure, but you still need to finish the job.
“It can also feel like we’ve got a really good partnership with Saud [Shakeel] and Babar [Azam], or Kamran [Ghulam] and [Mohammad] Rizwan, or me and Saim [Ayub] in both innings and you feel that you can take them on and have a great score. You’re never set in these conditions whether with the bat or the ball. We’re learning the hard way through a defeat, but the challenge is that we have to respond to this and make sure once we get into winning positions, we must make sure we win the game rather than bring the other team back into it.”
“The message is clear, age is just a number,” Masood said. “The disappointing thing is a performance like that should be on the winning side. I also thought Saud Shakeel’s innings [was excellent] – if we had batted a bit better with him – he would have got a hundred. Those two performances deserved to be on the winning side, and unfortunately they’re not.”
