England’s return to Rawalpindi brings with it reminders of one of the nation’s great away wins, secured here just under two years ago, and with them perhaps a small but nevertheless handy bump to a few players’ morale. “That was a mega win, wasn’t it?” said Harry Brook. “Hopefully we can take some of that confidence and momentum and bring it into this game.”
Ben Stokes certainly felt a spring in his step when he first walked back on to the ground where, in the dying moments of the final day, Jack Leach winkled out the last wicket to secure a remarkable victory. Or at least, what he thought was that ground. “When we turned up at the first Test I said to Leachy, ‘Oh, some great memories here!’ he said. “And it was the wrong place.”
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On Tuesday, in the right location, Stokes was reminiscing again. “Wherever you go around the world, if certain things happen like that, you’re always going to remember those things,” Ben Stokes said. “Every player will have grounds where they can walk in and they’ll just go straight back to something special that happened to them.”
If there are fewer memories being mined in the Pakistan dressing room it is not just because that game was lost, but because of their journey since it finished. There is a sense going into this game that the state of the two sides could be illustrated by repurposing a GCSE-level video demonstrating kinetic particle theory: on one side movement has been relatively cool, smooth and calm, while so much heat has been applied to the other that all parts of it now move chaotically and unpredictably. The appeal of this match lies at least partly in the opportunity to see which extraordinary new areas they might find themselves bouncing into next.
One thing England have in their favour is consistency. “We’ve just got to keep on playing the way we have done, and the results will look after themselves,” said Brook. “The way we’ve been playing over the last few years has been really entertaining and we’ve drawn crowds and people have wanted to watch. If we keep on playing like that, the results will be there.”
They go into this game with the same top six that played in 2022, with the same coach, the same captain and the same guiding philosophy. Pakistan go into it with a governing body in flux, with only one of that game’s top four, with a different captain and a different coach, and with a team profoundly reorganised just 10 days ago without consulting either of them. To that they have then added an extra layer of chaos by equipping the ground staff with a generation-game-conveyor-belt of novel tools – patio heaters, outsized fans, sharp-toothed rakes, cuddly toy – and inviting them to experiment on the pitch. And yet the series is tied. Sometimes it seems desperation can be a massive bonus.
There is one thing that England will want to completely change, and that is their luck. It is now seven games and more than three months since they last won a toss, and this one could decide the series. Last week Pakistan took a series of wild gambles whose chances of success entirely hinged on success at the toss, and got away with it. As a result they negated England’s greatest strength – their batting on flat surfaces – while emphasising their own – spin bowling on turning ones.
‘I wouldn’t say it was win the toss, win the game scenario, but I think it was probably a 65-35 toss,” the England coach, Brendon McCullum, said in Multan. While the way the pitch for this match has been prepared means it is hard to tell what might happen – “It might turn early on, it might be a good pitch to start with, who knows?” said Brook – here it is expected to be only marginally less decisive.
“The toss out in the subcontinent plays a bigger role than anywhere in the world,” Stokes said. “I don’t think we’re going to have as extreme conditions [as in Multan] as the game goes on – it will be a day one wicket when we start, not day six. It looks like it will be a pretty decent wicket for the first couple of days but there’s not too much grass to hold everything together. A couple of days’ traffic on there, footholes and stuff like that – it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.”
England have made a couple of gambles of their own this time, betting firstly on Stokes’s fitness – picking as their second seamer someone who has not bowled as many as 20 overs in a match since that last visit to Rawalpindi in December 2022 – and then on their 20-year-old leg-spinning wildcard Rehan Ahmed.
Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Ollie Pope, Joe Root, Harry Brook, Ben Stokes (c), Jamie Smith (wk), Gus Atkinson, Rehan Ahmed, Jack Leach, Shoaib Bashir.
Possible Pakistan team: Abdullah Shafique, Saim Ayub, Shan Masood (c), Kamran Ghulam, Saud Shakeel, Mohammad Rizwan, Salman Agha, Aamer Jamal, Sajid Khan, Noman Ali, Mohammad Ali.
“Leg spinners have an amazing ability to break a game open,” Stokes said. “Having his batting ability lower down the order is also a massive bonus. The way Jack Leach and Shoaib Bashir have bowled has been fantastic in these first two Tests. Adding Rehan’s free spirit and desperation to change the game every time he’s got the ball in his hand is a massive bonus for us.”
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