by England’s already slim chance of turning the second Test around evaporated on a sultry Friday morning as they threw away their bats – in one case literally – and their wickets, allowing Noman Ali and Sajid Khan to lead Pakistan to their first home win in the Test to push 12 games and three and a half years.
Although a successful chase seemed unlikely at the start of the day, with England’s openers already thrown out and 261 still needed, it didn’t take long for that to fall completely out of the realm of possibility. In the end, England failed to reach even half of their target as Noman took eight wickets in the second innings, including seven on a dizzying final morning when the tourists were bowled out for 144. Pakistan won by 152, avoiding a dreaded series beauty and a series decider is being prepared in Rawalpindi next week.
The whole of England remained true to assistant coach Paul Collingwood’s promise on Thursday evening not to give up his mantra of playing attacking balls and looking for quick goals. The tactic’s intended aim of putting pressure on the bowlers was somewhat undermined by the regularity with which they lost wickets.
Pakistan made their first breakthrough with the eighth ball of the morning. Sajid’s turn transformed Ollie Pope’s drive from a good defensive shot into a straight-back hit, setting the tone for a chaotic hour. After he confidently dealt with 26 balls on Thursday evening. Joe Root only scored eight more before missing a sweep and being given out lbw.
Like Root, Harry Brook also fell to Noman, who finally got reward for the quality of his bowling throughout the game after Sajid took the wicket in the first innings. Just as Root Brook reviewed the LBW decision on the pitch and sent fans into the busiest sections of the pitch, the Hanif Muhammad and Mushtaq Ahmed enclosures, streaming from the shaded seats above to the flat concourse below so they could Experience on the stadium’s big screen how the DRS system works its magic and seals the fate of the batters. Brooks 16 made this his first Test in Pakistan without scoring a century, lowering his national average to a modest 101.25.
Jamie Smith scored just six before making an error in the middle where Shan Masood took an easy catch. Ben Stokes and Brydon Carse then scored 37 for the seventh wicket, England’s best partnership, with a lovely pair of sixes that Carse hit off Sajid before the captain came down the track to Noman, missed the ball and let it be through Follow-through release his racket. As it sailed high back, Stokes turned around empty-handed and saw Mohammad Rizwan removing the supports.
Carse added another six to his collection before his turn was next. With a wild jump he only managed to make Noman slip. Having become accustomed to more fleshy contact, he apparently didn’t even notice it, leading to the most puzzling of the day’s many criticisms. That, as it turned out, left Noman with just six balls left to throw: Jack Leach pushed the fifth of those into his pads, from where it flew to Abdullah Shafique at short leg, and Shoaib Bashir pushed the sixth to the same fielder.
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Victory is Pakistan’s reward for the huge risk they took when they decided to play on a used pitch and field a team full of spinners, a risk whose chances of success depended almost entirely on winning the toss and the best batting conditions on the field first day and best bowling conditions afterwards. It doesn’t feel like a particularly repeatable approach that’s likely to result in consistent, long-term success, but they’ll feel like this is something they can plan for another time. While they struggled to keep this series alive, it was the best they had.
England tried to cover all bases with their team selection and at some moments might have regretted choosing both two spinners instead of an additional seamer and two seamers instead of an additional spinner. However, after losing such an important toss, they ended up needing every other moment of the coin toss to prevail. Particularly on the field on the third day, when they dropped Salman Agha twice while he was still in single figures and then watched him add more than 50 crucial bonus runs, or when Ben Duckett caught Sajid Khan but had the ball as a swing had to drop took him over the boundary, or when Saim Ayub scored the first ever runs of Pakistan’s second innings by tantalizingly top-edging over the heads of the wicket-keeper and slip, or when the ball bounced off Aamer Jamal’s pad and Crawley narrowly missed a diving Zak, it didn’t quite happen.
