After
the third Test ended,
Saim Ayub headed off to the Caribbean, where he resumed his successful campaign with the Jamaica Kingsmen in the CPL.
Mohammad Abbas hung around in the UK to link up with Derbyshire in his beloved County Championship once more, as they try and keep alive their slim hopes of promotion.
Babar Azam will, for the first time in years, participate in
Pakistan‘s domestic red-ball cricket later this week. Individuals making individual decisions, rather than a team coming home after a Test series.
That is apt for a side that can be called that – a side – only in the loosest deployment of the term. Nearly half of those who went to England were no longer part of the collective unit within a fortnight, and another seven men barely in the realms of selection joined them. Their stand-in captain
had been banished, their keeper was being
hauled up back home by criminal investigators. The coaches, too, were gone, replaced by new ones.
There may be vast enough questions about where the Pakistan Test side goes from here. The series in England was – at least within the context of cricket itself – a cataclysm, culminating in a historic first whitewash ever for Pakistan in England. Bar an hour of one evening on the penultimate day of the series, there was little excitement to be gleaned. Even England, in truth, appeared mildly bored midway through it, ticking off the ones like checkpoints on a bucket list. The ICC
added insult to injury, taking away 11 of the 16 points they had in the current WTC cycle. Pakistan were already bottom of the standings; the fine now takes them to a cellar-dwelling 4.63%, five times worse than West Indies, one position above them.
But where they go can wait: not far, is the answer, even if you ask the statistics. Pakistan will need to figure out what their Test side actually is first. There is no evidence yet of the PCB’s appetite to draw a line in the sand over the culling of half the Test side, and how much of that was punitive rather than reactive.
Mohammad Rizwan and
Imam-ul-Haq are unlikely to be part of Pakistan’s plans in the near future, though the challenges go far beyond them.
Pakistan are, for one, no longer a side that can treat talent as a sustainable resource. This was illustrated succinctly by the kind of month
Salman Agha has had. His drop in form and general struggles have been visible for all to see in Test cricket, culminating in his stunning fall from captaining his side in England to being sent home in twelve days. No matter, Pakistan could always pick up the next cab off the rank, calling in whoever stepped up instead. It was … Salman Agha himself,
scoring a triple hundred the day after Pakistan’s tour of England officially concluded. Perhaps there isn’t talent coming through, or maybe the gap between international and Pakistan’s domestic cricket is no so wide that Pakistan’s most out-of-form batter is still far too good for the domestic circuit.
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.
And while in that cubicle, Pakistan could at least pretend to like some of those stuck in there with them.
Azan Awais continued to show modest promise in England, and seems one of the few whose growth is linear enough to suggest the possibility of sustainable improvement.
Saud Shakeel, until now an Asian conquerer, showed signs of increasing comfort against the short ball in England, even if he ended the series with a ripsnorter and then an earful from Jofra Archer.
Abdullah Shafique has not turned up in England, but his numbers on Pakistani pitches, too, are not to be sneezed at, especially not for a batting line-up as pallid as Pakistan’s.
Razaullah is flavour of the month, and until Pakistan find a shiny new toy to play with, he can expect to see some extra love and attention.
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.
There are far greyer decisions to worry about than a black-and-white one like Babar.
Mike Hesson has
thrown his hat into the ring as Pakistan hunt for a Test coach. What factors Pakistan absorb into their final decision will determine the direction the Test side takes, especially in a set-up that potentially boasts such little experience coaching red-ball cricket. Does Abbas go back to effectively being an away specialist, and find himself out of the side after finishing as Pakistan’s leading wicket-taker in England? Pakistan have always had a knack for thinking they are in scenarios where Abbas isn’t required even if the evidence suggests that set of circumstances very rarely exists.
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.
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