In the coming weeks, Pakistan will find an arrangement to make do with what they have, much like millions of people worldwide make do with agreeing to wake up at ungodly hours, pour out into traffic jams, cram themselves into buses and trains, and seat themselves at a cubicle before they can pour their morning coffee. Pakistan cannot afford to sack players en masse any more than workers of the world can unite to quit their jobs in the absence of an acceptable alternative.
Angst about Babar’s form is a national pastime, but there is an easy compromise to strike here; yell at him when he gets out, but treat him as a set-and-forget in the middle order. He hasn’t scored a Test hundred in nearly four years and his conversion rate is maddening, but that’s mainly because there are runs to convert in the first place.
Babar will never now become the player who once threatened to break into the Fab Four, but since he returned after first being dropped from the side in October 2024, he has scored eight half-centuries in 22 innings, and averaged just under 39. No Pakistan player betters either number. There are no players domestically in Pakistan who offer any evidence of being able to replicate numbers of this ilk, even in his diminished state. Any debate about his place in the side is akin to starving oneself instead of cooking a home-cooked meal because eating out might be affordable another day.
The Abbas question is downstream of the bigger – perhaps biggest – question of all as Pakistan stretch into another Test-heavy home winter. The last two seasons have seen Pakistan go all-in on slow, turning tracks, relying on spin-to-win tactics in more ways than one, in that the outcome of a coin toss ends up having a vastly outsize impact on the game. Pakistan have, in this time, been lucky enough to win four tosses of six at home, and won four games.
Should Pakistan persist with that strategy, Abbas’ presence will likely be deemed superfluous. It would stretch a run that has seen Abbas yet to reach double figures for Test wickets in Pakistan; he has as many in his home nation as in Ireland, or indeed, as many as he got at Lord’s. However, Pakistan’s opponents this time around blight the wisdom of that tactic anyway. Sri Lanka arrive in November – not exactly short of a spinner – and following them are New Zealand, who responded to spinning wickets with a 3-0 clean sweep in India in 2024.
This side, or some side, will eventually come together before the next series. They will even be called a team. But as events in England demonstrated, the social-Darwinist environment of Pakistan can mean it is too often every man for himself. At the bottom of the table, every opponent, after all, is a natural predator.
