The sun was only just coming up in England when the last wicket went down in Pakistan. Jack Leach was deftly stumped by Mohammad Rizwan as he came galumphing down the pitch to swing and miss at a wide, of all things. Noman Ali had bowled the ball out there deliberately, fast and flat after he saw Leach coming.
It was a simple trick, like an uncle bewitching his nephew by pretending to tug off his thumb. England had a pyrrhic lead of 35 at the time, and on television Ramiz Raja lost the run of himself and prematurely called a famous victory for Pakistan. He was as good as right. The match was effectively over when Joe Root was caught behind for 33, but finally ended 30 minutes later when Shan Masood hit the winning six.
It is always five o’clock somewhere, and this has turned into one of those English winters when whatever hour you wake the cricket team seems to be somewhere along the way to losing. It happens slowly, slowly, and then all of a sudden. That is the way the game’s played in Pakistan, where defeats unfold like bankruptcies. It was not long ago when England were enjoying the riches of 823 for seven, the fourth-highest total in Test history. And here they were, two weeks later, grubbing around in the dust to try to find enough singles to make a game of it.
It has been a strange series, and it turned on Pakistan’s decision to drop their three star players, Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi, and Naseem Shah, and recall a couple of journeymen finger-spinners, Noman Ali and Sajid Khan. They set them to work on a used pitch in the second Test, and an abused pitch the third Test, baked and raked to try to emulate the worn state of the one they had won on the week before. Across those two games, Sajid and Noman bowled 206 out of the 224 overs England faced, and took 39 wickets at just over 17 runs each.
They are some double act, the best Pakistan have had since Saeed Ajmal and Abdur Rehman, who turned over another good England team in the UAE in 2012 (there is nothing new in Test cricket, least of all England’s habit of cracking up on a spinning pitch). Sajid carries on like he is auditioning to play the Genie in the big Christmas panto at the Palladium, while at the other end you hardly seem to notice Noman at all until it is too late. He foxed Ben Stokes into leaving alone a ball that did exactly nothing off the pitch.
Stokes still seemed to be fuming about it in his post-match interviews a couple of hours later. He has had a lean year, with a top score of 70 in 10 tests, and six wickets at 36 each when he has been able to bowl. His captaincy has seemed off in this series, too. You could see hints of it in the second Test, when he felt the need to apologise to his teammates for his negative body language, and again in the third, when he uncharacteristically let Saud Shakeel drift along in single while he was batting Pakistan into a lead on the second day.
The 33-year-old said after that the team were going to move straight on from the loss. “You get thrown challenges all over the world, in a couple of weeks we go to New Zealand and we’ll have to try to match them as well.”
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The schedule is pitiless, the first Test in Christchurch in just over a month from now, and the unique circumstances of this series mean you can understand why he would want to forget all about it. England are not due to play a Test in Asia again until 2027, and after all the injuries you have to wonder whether Stokes will still be playing Test cricket then.
But it is starting to feel as if Stokes’s England might be at risk of falling into the old trap of thinking too far ahead of themselves. They have had one eye on next year’s Ashes ever since they came back from India in March, and Stokes clearly sees that series as his next, and maybe last, Everest in the game.
It was the reason they dropped James Anderson, the reason they stuck with Shoaib Bashir all summer, the reason they gave a debut to Josh Hull against Sri Lanka. The upshot is they have now lost three of their last four matches. Each time they lose, the cracks get a little wider, the doubts around, say, Ollie Pope’s position at No 3, a little louder.
Last time England came to Pakistan, they lived by Brendon McCullum’s mantra of “be where your feet are”. They would do well to get back to the simple business of putting everything into winning the next session, of the next day, of the next Test, of the next series. Australia may be looming, but the best way to get there is one win at a time. Same as always.
