Mohammad Abbas is not with his teammates. He is telling the curator what to do. Not with footmarks, but with the marking of the crease. It is drinks on day four of a series his team is going to lose, and he is out there making sure everything is done properly.
That is a professional cricketer.
There are over ten groundstaff at Edgbaston, every morning they go out on the surface to ensure that the crease is done right.
It fades and sinks into the ground; sometimes it looks like it’s not straight, but after day one, the line stays in the same place because, at every break in play, they make sure it does. Everyone knows this.
And yet, Mohammad Abbas wants to be positive. To him, cricket is not about vibes, or how hard you try; he is a surgeon, and he wants to ensure that something this important is absolutely perfect.
Abbas is a man of millimetres, who plays for a careless team.
Pakistan has bowled 1837 deliveries, and somehow they have overstepped on 37 no balls.
The line doesn’t move. They just don’t adjust. They can’t get it done.
Pakistan has sent out more than 20 people for this series, some never played, others shouldn’t have. But really, only Saud Shakeel and Abbas have looked like genuine Test quality– outside of Razaullah’s dirty fever dream.
As a team, they should be forgiven for being dropped into the PCB shit show, the chaos around coaches and selection. Shakeel basically pulled a Mariah Carey on the new picks, saying he did not know them. And none of this is new; the Pakistan lineup has been unprofessional for 25 years.
However, the crease does not move.
It has stayed in the same spot every single time a Pakistani cricketer has played. Whether you are a foetus like Razaullah, or Mohammad Abbas’s old, often unused arse. Just stay behind it. That is all. Keep it that simple.
For three Tests, they have made cricket look like an unknowable concept. Pakistan lost three nil in a series where no one made a hundred and one of England’s four bowlers took four (three in the very last innings) wickets. If England had all four bowlers taking wickets and a bunch of hundreds, it is technically possible they might have won this series four nil.
Watching Pakistan play is like watching a three-year-old reassemble a fart.
More than a decade ago in England, this team ruined their cricket by overstepping the line for money. This time, they overstepped the line through sheer incompetence.
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Pakistan’s runs in each innings
Pakistan ended this series by being way, way better than at any other time. Their innings was set up by their young player Azan Awais, and the two old fellas Shan Masood and Babar Azam helped. Before their puppy dog quick went whack, thack, kaboom and bozoinks into the skies of Birmingham.
Had Pakistan actually pulled off this VVS Bob Willis attempt, it might have changed the narrative. But it is important to remember just how bad this team were for so long.
In this series, England’s tail (8-11) averaged more than Pakistan’s top seven. Josh Tongue could bat eight for the tourists and severely improve their lineup.
Coming into this final innings, he had scored as many boundaries as any Pakistani who was not named Saud Shakeel. And, in all honesty, he looked more settled than them. Sure, he had faced a flat military medium attack. But he is a number eleven who knows what he does best, and Pakistan’s top order looks like they are assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded in a hurricane.
One of Pakistan’s few hopes in this series was Babar Azam. Well, maybe hope is the wrong word, but if anyone was going to do it, and they probably were not, he was the most likely of the least likely. If that sentence makes little sense, so does Babar’s career.
He missed the first Test with an injury, then was outscored by Tongue right up until 3-0 was basically inevitable.
Babar and Shan Masood finally came good when people were etching 3-0 into the record.
This was one of the many reasons that Pakistan made no runs in their first innings. They were so bad, you could almost argue their first knocks were void. They were out of every game by the halfway point, and really, they barely got that far.
England’s opening pair averaged less than 15 runs together in this series. That is terribly low, and yet, Pakistan went at 3.33. At Lord’s, their opening was so bad they lost Imam-ul-Haq before batting.
So England’s biggest weakness didn’t matter.
Remember, this England side wasn’t exactly flying; they were one coach and captain down after the start of the summer. On the rankings, this should have been two evenly matched ordinary teams.
It would seem that England are ranked fifth, and Pakistan are closer to the 198th place their football team is ranked.
On this tour they brought out 23 players; 16 of them played. Some just got frequent flyer miles. England used 11.
England have two openers that they’re not sure about, and their fourth seamer really didn’t do much. But they understood they need to see more of Emilio Gay, Ben Duckett has been a star and Gus Atkinson bowled well despite the lack of wickets.
It is easier to be an adult when you are winning. But they could have panicked, made changes, and done weird things. Instead, Pakistan panicked enough for five teams.
Saim Ayub is one of those decisions. He clearly has talent and is worth watching going ahead. But he was picked partly because of his bowling, which seems more white ball than red.
As England needed 10 runs to win, he was bowling to Jordan Cox. Both are young players new to international cricket. But the English batter (and now keeper) seems to know his game very well. His play has a structure, and each action has a reason.
When Ayub delivered two balls on a good length around off stump, he defended them. They were good deliveries and had him prodding a little. But then the Pakistani part timer came around the wicket. He is a carrom ball bowler, so Ayub’s best delivery is over the wicket at off stump as he was bowling.
There is no reason for him to come around. It doesn’t follow at all. He cannot spin the ball around anyone’s legs; it’s an angle that can only help the batter. And then he bowled it two feet outside leg stump. It was perhaps the easiest run in Cox’s short international career.
At this point, it’s OK to think the match and series were over, so why does this even need mentioning?
Because it didn’t need to happen. He did it purely because he could, not because he should. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t stack up, it didn’t help. No process or cricket thinking was involved. That was their series.
On the last ball, Pakistan misfielded. On the first ball of the series they lost a wicket. That is how you lose a series.
And maybe their only chance of anything came early on day four of the last Test.
Again Mohammad Abbas was on fire. In the first over, he had the ball on a string, and England’s top order kept finding him impossible. All Pakistan needed was one bowler at the other end. They went with the predictably unpredictable pace of Razaullah. He got met, so Mohammad Ali bowled again.
The wicket had some low bounce, and his inseam wobble ball was on point. England stopped scoring and tried to survive. Then they moved the field around to give Joe Root a funky looking offside field with a catching cover point and a wide mid off.
The England captain took the bait and played a big ugly shot, right at the moment Ali got one to seam like an off spinner. It knocked out leg stump.
This is what Abbas needed, just one bowler at the other end, backing his play. But Root didn’t leave the crease, he waited for the umpires to check, and for the 16th time in this series (he would bowl another one later), Mohammad Ali overstepped the crease.
Mohammad Ali is good enough to bowl at mid 80s, nip the ball like an off-spinner, take the inside edge of a top-15 batter of all time, and knock his leg stump out of the fucken ground. He is also not good enough to avoid bowling these kinds of deliveries or to keep his feet behind the line.
Pakistan did not lose this match or series because of no balls. That was just a symptom of what everyone can see. They are not professional, and that is why they lose.
They are on the wrong side of the line all the time.
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History will remember Razaullah
by Rob Barron
A first innings deficit of 320 runs. One more chance to bat in a series of laughable ineptitude. Nine days of insipid, monotonous drudgery as Pakistan hurtled towards the foregone conclusion of 3-0 with none of the glimpses of magic or nonsense they always bring to the game. Of course it was the full carnage off the field, with nobody accepting responsibility for the disarray, probably because whoever was in charge had sacked themselves by accident.
One more chance then for the team to reach 200 for the first time on the tour, to leave these shores with some hope, or at least give their fans a type of entertainment that wasn’t embarrassing. So, with four balls gone in their innings it was 0/2. Pakistan gonna Pakistan. The ignominy of a day 2 finish was odds-on. They’d thrown in the towel, the bathmat, the flannels, and their dignity. At this point they were 1000-1 to win the match, and they were only 1000-1 because the bookies’ betting software doesn’t allow them to offer odds that are bigger than that. Boring.
Then Pakistan really started Pakistanning. Never, EVER think that Pakistan are going to go a whole series without doing the completely impossible. Making England bat again would’ve been a real achievement. Some of the old guard played like professional cricketers for a bit to set the platform for Abbas, whose Test-best 29 was scored seven years ago. Oh, and the kid would have a swing too. You know the rest but if any innings is worth revisiting, it’s Razaullah’s. Rewatching the nine sixes a load of times last night was like falling asleep on Homer Simpson’s dream bed and your brain replaying your favourite TV show ever.
The flay over deep square off Tongue was the bit in the Wire where Brother Mouzone faces off with Omar. The crash off Atkinson into the building site was Dwight Shrute giving Kevin a back massage in season 7 of the US Office. The brutal belter over long on a couple of balls later? Only Fools and Horses, A Losing Streak. Next ball, the beautifully ugly smear into the middle of next week? The episode of ER where Mark Green dies. Fuck me that’s stayed with me.
The ball from Archer he pulverised over long-off was that episode of Better Call Saul where Jimmy has to go and pick up Lalo’s bail money in the desert. The ball after, which killed about eight birds on its way to Kidderminster- The Office, Training. The kitchen-sinker 12 balls later? Cheers- Pick a Con... Any Con. The baby six off Atkinson? The Simpsons- Homer the Heretic. Then the last one. The marauding, bloodthirsty bushwhack off Dan Lawrence. Quite possibly the best thing anyone’s ever put on TV. Breaking Bad- Dead Freight.
On to today then, with Pakistan 50/1 to defend 130. They had to be the good Pakistan. Actually, they had to be perfect. Abbas’s first over was. He nailed Duckett first ball and got rid of Gay with his sixth. Game on. It’s not hyperbolic to suggest if Pakistan got it done from where they were it would rank as the greatest heist in the history of Test match cricket. Then the wheels completely came off, because people started thinking they could do it, and because Pakistan. The fielders went through the full comedy showcase. Misfields everywhere. Overthrows. Ali bowled Root, but off Pakistan’s thirty sixth no ball of the series. There was a five wides. There was a five no balls. From two down in their last batting innings of the tour, Pakistan became the best versions of themselves and made a game of it. From two down in their last bowling innings, they went back to what they’ve done best this summer- the full nonsense.
England win the series 3-0 then, but nobody will remember that. History will remember Razaullah’s razing, rambunctious rampage, and it was better than any TV you’ll ever see.
