For the best part of two days England toiled in the field, hours of perspiration and very occasional inspiration in which Pakistan gradually accumulated a score that many teams – though perhaps not this one, who beyond their general proclivity to positivity have won the last two games in which they had conceded more than 500 – would find completely daunting. England kept calm, they kept trying, pushing, working, making occasional inroads but very few mistakes. And then, in the space of just a few minutes, that all changed.
It started with the dismissal of Shaheen Shah Afridi, Pakistan’s ninth wicket to fall, with their score on 549. In the next over Salman Agha, having just become his team’s third centurion, advanced to Joe Root, swung, missed and turned to see Jamie Smith inexplicably fumble the most straightforward stumping chance. In the over after that Abrar Ahmed top-edged to midwicket, where Gus Atkinson craned his neck to track the ball’s looping trajectory, set his hands, and then somehow allowed the ball to plop through them.
The over after that ended with Root firing a bouncer in to Abrar, which might have been remarkable enough on its own, and the batter deflected it with the toe of his bat straight to slip, where Ben Duckett took the catch, ended the Pakistan innings and in the process injured his left thumb. After the change of innings Ollie Pope, opening for the first time in first-class cricket as Duckett’s stand-in, pulled his second delivery viciously over midwicket, where Aamer Jamal leapt to his right, flung out a hand, and plucked the ball out of the air. England had lost one wicket and – unless Duckett’s thumb manages to heal itself overnight – one injured batter, and Pakistan’s bowlers had the two coolest hours of the day in which to cause havoc and 556 to defend.
Together Zak Crawley and Joe Root brought calm to end the crisis, while still scoring at nearly five an over. Crawley batted with particular fluency, somehow convincing the ball to scream across an outfield that had often appeared sluggish. He reached 50 off only 55 balls, 10 of them hit for four including two impeccable cover drives off in a single over from Shaheen. By the close England were 96 for one, still trailing by 460, Crawley precisely doubling Root’s score with 64.
Until things took a turn for the tumultuous Salman’s innings had been the day’s highlight – a textbook late-innings effort, beautifully judged to combine speed of scoring with caring for the tail. At one stage, with Shaheen at the other end, he faced 30 of 36 deliveries across six overs, scoring 36 runs including singles off the final ball of five overs in succession. He took 71 balls over his first 50, 37 to get his second, pressured Pope into perhaps his most ludicrous review yet – England’s stand-in captain taking his running tally to 0 out of 12 by asking the TV umpire, Chris Gaffaney, whether a ball that pitched outside leg stump and would have missed the wicket by at least a foot might also have trapped Salman lbw – and ended the innings unbeaten with 104 off 119.
But if Chris Woakes’s feet were just half a size smaller, none of that would have happened. Salman had scored only 15 when he launched a Leach delivery down the ground and the Warwickshire all-rounder settled himself underneath it. The catch was taken, but with the fielder’s momentum carrying him towards the boundary he tossed it back in the air, stopped himself, and pouched it as he leapt back over the padding. It was a genuinely great display of outfielding, until Gaffaney noticed that as he lifted off Woakes’s big toe was still brushing the grass on the wrong side of the rope when he caught the ball for the second time. How England paid for that half-second.
Play had resumed in the morning with Pakistan 328 for four and rebuilding after an England fightback. Gradually Saud Shakeel hauled his score upwards from his overnight 35 towards an eventual total of 82, at which point he was surprised by a Shoaib Bashir delivery that turned and bounced and caught at slip. Meanwhile the nightwatchman, Naseem Shah, having faced three deliveries the previous evening, frustrated England for a further 78, scoring slowly but for those moments – three of them – when he thrashed a spinner down the ground for six.
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The 21-year-old is developing into a handy late-innings batter, capable of occupying the crease to free someone more skilled to score runs at the other end – a 78-ball six against Sri Lanka last year, a 46-ball six and a 52-ball five in the year before that – but with a developing eye for occasional carnage. There were no sixes in his first 16 Test innings, but there have now been seven in his past eight. Eventually however he steered a ball to Harry Brook at leg slip, giving Brydon Carse his first Test wicket, having contributed a handy 33.
In contrast to the two centurions on day one Mohammad Rizwan came into this game in excellent form – since the end of 2022 he had averaged 76.71 in nine innings, never scoring fewer than 28 – and he duly fell for a 12-ball duck, biding his time, easing his way into his innings, and then scuttling backwards to give himself space to slap a Jack Leach delivery straight to mid-off. This was a day when the predictable and the prosaic occasionally gave way to the completely unexpected.
