Perhaps for the first time under Brendon McCullum, belief slightly drained away during moonshot run chase in Multan
It was a pretty good week for fans outside of cricket’s so-called Big Three. In Dubai, West Indies sent England tumbling out of the Women’s T20 World Cup, then South Africa produced a remarkable demolition job on Australia and now meet New Zealand in Sunday’s final. In Bangalore, New Zealand’s men rolled India for a marmalade-dropping 46 all out, their lowest total in a home Test.
And in Multan, on a pitch refurbished in between Tests with the use of giant fans at either end, Pakistan secured a restorative victory over England - their first in 12 matches at home to set up a tantalising series decider in Rawalpindi next week.
All it took was dropping three poster boys, recalling two wily old spinners in Noman Ali and Sajid Khan, and Shan Masood winning the toss on this surface of diminishing returns. It was a gamble, no question, but still required a telling performance thereafter; the kind that offered the latest reminder of Pakistan’s ability to lurch from maelstrom to magnificent in the blink of an eye.
Statistically, England’s slump with the bat was also quite something. Shortly after tea on the second day of the second Test – day seven, if you will – they had scored 1,034 runs in the series for the loss of just nine wickets, ticking along at 5.4 runs an over. But after the deluge of records came something akin to Squid Game. The tourists lost 18 for 224 in just 59.3 overs as they largely tried to sweep their way out of trouble on a surface that, if not a full-blown minefield, had certainly become no man’s land by the end.
Unlike the Oval five weeks ago, where England phoned in a sloppy outing against Sri Lanka and blew their chance of a perfect home summer, this latest defeat was far less self-inflicted and so the philosophical outlooks of Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum were not unreasonable.
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