England’s already remote chance of turning the second Test their way evaporated on a steamy Friday morning as they threw their bats around – literally, in one case – and their wickets away, allowing Noman Ali and Sajid Khan to bowl Pakistan to their first home Test win for 12 games and three and a half years.
If a successful run chase looked unlikely at the start of the day, with England’s openers already dismissed and 261 more runs still required, it did not take long for it to slip beyond the realms of possibility altogether.
In the end, England did not even get halfway to their target, with Noman taking eight second-innings wickets, including seven on a dizzying final morning, as the tourists were bowled out for 144. Pakistan won by 152 runs, avoiding a dreaded series whitewash and setting up a series decider in Rawalpindi next week.
Throughout, England stuck true to their assistant coach Paul Collingwood’s promise on Thursday evening that they would not abandon their mantra of playing attacking shots and trying to score rapidly. The tactic’s intended goal of putting pressure on the bowlers was undermined somewhat by the regularity with which they lost wickets.
Pakistan made their first breakthrough with just the eighth ball of the morning, Sajid’s spin turning Ollie Pope’s push from a decent defensive shot into a straightforward return catch and setting the tone for a chaotic hour to come. After safely navigating 26 balls on Thursday evening, Joe Root faced only eight more before missing a sweep and being given out lbw.
Like Root, Harry Brook fell to Noman, who was finally getting reward for the quality of his bowling across the match after Sajid hogged the first-innings wicket-taking. Like Root, Brook reviewed the on-field lbw decision, sending fans in the busiest sections of the ground, the Hanif Mohammad and Mushtaq Ahmed enclosures, cascading down from the shaded seats at the top to the flat concourse at the bottom so they could turn to see the DRS work its magic and seal the batters’ fate on the stadium’s one big screen. Brook’s 16, after nine in the first innings, made this his first Test in Pakistan that has not featured a century and brought his average in the country tumbling down to a humble 101.25.
Jamie Smith scored only six before he miscued a slog to mid-on, where Shan Masood took an easy catch. Ben Stokes and Brydon Carse then scored 37 for the seventh wicket, England’s best partnership, featuring a handsome pair of sixes hammered down the ground by Carse off Sajid, before the captain came down the track to Noman, missed the ball and, as he swung through his follow-through, let go of his bat. While it sailed high to backward square leg, Stokes turned empty-handed to see Mohammad Rizwan remove the bails.
Carse added one more six to his collection before he became the next to go, a wild hoik succeeding only in edging Noman to slip. Having become used to meatier contact, he obviously did not even notice this one, leading to the most puzzling of the day’s many reviews. That left Noman with, as it transpired, only six balls still to bowl: Jack Leach edged the fifth of them into his pads, from where it looped to Abdullah Shafique at short leg, and Shoaib Bashir pushed the sixth to the same fielder.
Victory is Pakistan’s reward for the great gamble they took in choosing to play the Test on a used pitch and to field a team packed with spinners, a risk whose chances of success were almost entirely reliant on winning the toss and enjoying the best of the batting conditions on day one and the best of the bowling conditions thereafter.
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It does not feel seem a particularly repeatable approach likely to lead to consistent, long-term success, but Pakistan will feel that is something they can plan for another time. As they fought to keep this series alive it was the best they had.
England tried to cover all bases with their team selection, and at various moments might have regretted both picking two spinners rather than an extra seamer, and picking two seamers rather than an extra spinner.
In the end, though, having lost such a vital toss, they needed all the other coin-flip moments to fall their way. Particularly in the field on the third day, such as when they twice dropped Salman Agha 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 to drop the ball as his momentum took him over the boundary; or when Saim Ayub scored the very first runs of Pakistan’s second innings by top-edging tantalisingly over the heads of wicketkeeper and slip; or when the ball looped off Aamer Jamal’s pad and just wide of a diving Zak Crawley. Sadly for Stokes and his team, it did not quite happen.