The ball is possessed. It should, by all rights, be at square leg, or maybe back down the pitch. At worst, heading off towards legside safely. But instead it floats, unnaturally, towards wide mid-on.
The laws of nature cannot explain it. The laws of man would not allow it. The laws of cricket consent to it.
And so another Pakistani batter is out, in the ugliest, weirdest and most horrific way possible.
There is still nearly two hours until lunch, and it will only get worse.
***
There is an old man crying right now; he doesn’t know why. Tears run down his cheek; his copy of the newspaper is stained. His grief sticks him to his ergonomically designed rocking chair.
The reason for his pain is that Test cricket has changed. And it terrifies him.
This old man knows the game, has lived it all his life, and this mutant hybrid sharktopus in front of him is not his sport. It has changed, and every single moment of the first session at Edgbaston reminds him of this.
The first ball of the day moves violently down the onside, so it was four leg byes. Technically, this is a win for the batting team. But really, it is a jump scare.
This is a delivery that was pitched a mile outside off stump; how has it ended up outside leg? It isn’t often you see a terrifying four leg byes, but this is one.
There is a trope in horror movies of the comically unaware being murdered early because they have not read the news. Saim Ayub played a bunch of on-the-up drives in a way that suggests he has not seen a Test match since January 2025 because he’s been watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives on loop. Dude, look behind you, there is a grim reaper with a giant scythe who has been taking the souls of every single batter. Why on earth are you loosely driving at balls?
There is always one character who does the worst thing possible in every situation. Shan Masood’s shot was like running into the woods at midnight barefoot and basically naked bleeding from every orifice and hoping you outrun werewolves. On a wicket with up-and-down bounce, he played a half-hearted chip pull.
This is the face of a man who knows he did something very wrong.
Babar Azam was bowled. When he walked off, he gestured that the ball kept low; it did, it also came back in violently. But at a certain point, when it comes to Babar’s career, the call is coming from inside the house, and he is making the call. He is the killer, and the victim.
So at this point, Pakistan had been the prey, but of course, you need one person who doesn’t get stabbed or eaten. And again, that is Saud Shakeel.
There is always a moment when it feels like it should go wrong for him. He is not cautious; he doesn’t do the sensible things. He stands in his crease and wafts his bat around. And so it feels like he should be a victim.
But he also hit a lot of fours, with this exact method. Concrete feet, artist’s hands, and a perfect offside shot.
The ball runs away to the rope like it was predestined. You have to suspend your belief a little to trust that he can keep pumping offside boundaries while his team can’t even defend a ball. But it works. While his teammates play as if their bats were replaced by a magic spell that turns their willow into their aunties’ spines, he has some kind of alien blade that can only blast through the offside.
But he was not the only one to make runs. Pakistan chose Razaullah, a 21-year-old puppy dog fast bowler, who batted like he was unaware he was at a Test match. So a bowler and an offside stylist was why Pakistan made 100 runs. They were the only two players to make it to double figures by the break.
But Razaullah was Pakistan’s third top-scorer, because of leg byes. England allowed 14 of them as they chased LBWs and bowleds like they were reverse swinging the ball to the tail. Modern bowling is just lateral movement and constant appeals. Jofra Archer went up when the ball went down for four. Luckily the innings are so short, otherwise the bowlers would hurt their arms from raising them so often.
But the real shock here is not that Pakistan can’t bat, or that Ollie Robinson is dicing them up with rusty razorblades. It’s that they still scored 100 runs in the session.
That was the third time in history that a normal first session of a Test had 100 runs and seven wickets. Those are two pretty big extremes. It is not easy to lose that many straight up, and if you do, the idea of 100 runs with that many wickets is insane.
This didn’t even feel like an outlier. It felt like modern normal cricket. A team lost lots of wickets, they scored quick while doing it.
And somewhere, an old man cried. Not from the horror, but the grief of losing something. Pakistan never looked to shut up shop, England bowled algorithmic preformulated plans, there were heaps of wickets and heaps of runs. It felt like a highlights package more than a Test.
Well, some were lowlights. The comedy death had to be Azan Awais.
He got a delivery back of the length, he tried to push it around the corner, and he was caught at mid-on. This had happened in cricket for hundreds of years without this kind of dismissal. It wasn’t even one thing. Try getting out this way with a toothpick bat, or on old pitches without this kind of bounce. No, this was something that could only happen now.
Tests have been mutilated beyond belief by the modern era. Like someone dunked them in radioactive acid. They’re part T20, a little ODI, and barely any Test has survived.
What happened, WHAT FUCKEN HAPPENED, you scream into your woolen sweater, while Pakistan make 100 runs and lose seven wickets in a session that feels totally normal now.
Test cricket is possessed.
