Dubai. Pink ball hasn’t won the hearts of the players totally. Pakistan pacer Wahab Riaz as well as West Indies batsmen Marlon Samuels encountered different problems.

For Riaz he found the ball getting soft especially in the dew. “The first two sessions are fine but in the third session there is a lot of dew and the ball gets wet, the seam gets swollen too. When we bowled with the same ball the next day, the ball was very soft and it doesn’t do anything off the pitch.”

Riaz admitted: “We neither got conventional swing nor reverse swing.” If that was not enough, the pink ball had to be even repeatedly changed during the third day.

“After 55 overs it lost its shape because it got wet and we got another ball to bowl with which was a bit harder and that was going through nicely. The way Sohail Khan bowled to Samuels and we got that wicket because of the ball, which was harder and it was skidding on.”

Samuels who hit an aggressive 76 runs attributed his dismissal to difficulty in picking the pink ball especially a bowler with high action. “For me, the bowler who got me out had a high-arm action and I wasn’t picking out the ball as well as possible.”

Samuels also said it was a bit difficult to pick the ball as a fielder too. “This is my first game with the pink ball. A couple of times in the outfield you react late to the ball. So I guess we scored 300 runs so it’s very good for the game. But with the pink ball, we have to play more games to get used to it.”

Samuels expressed his disappointment at not getting a century playing with the pink ball. “I would love to score a hundred against the pink ball, but it didn’t happen, but my main objective was to come and contribute significantly for the team.”

He also said that Darren Bravo and himself showed how Test cricket should be played. “We played Test cricket today we were patient, we put away the bad balls, and we were picking up singles here and there, and this is Test cricket, and this is the way we should play, we should use today as a team and try to be more consistent with what we did today.”

Though the wicket had behaved in favour of the batsmen, Riaz believes that there could be a result. “We will need to work very hard (to get a result in this match). They say cricket is a funny game and it changes like anything. Obviously fourth innings is always the most difficult innings to play in, and our spinners will come into the act, we will try our best, we won’t just give up, we will do our best to win this match.”