It was still morning when Babar Azam came in to bat at Edgbaston. The Test was only 45 minutes old but you could already see which direction it was heading. Pakistan were three wickets down. The floodlights were on, a thick smear of black cloud was moving slowly over the ground, there were odd spots of rain in the air. Ollie Robinson was bowling from one end, with the keeper standing up and five slips spread in a line just behind, and Jofra Archer was on at the other, four overs into his spell and only just warming up. It was a hell of a time to be batting.
But then it always seems to be, lately.
Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, Babar was one of the very best batters in the game. In the space of eight Tests in 2022 he scored 196 against Australia in Karachi, 119 against Sri Lanka in Galle, 136 against England in Rawalpindi, and 161 against New Zealand back in Karachi. He finished that year with a Test batting average of 49, third in the world rankings, and as the ICC’s Men’s Cricketer of the Year. But he hasn’t scored a Test hundred since. In his past 20 Tests, his top score is 88 and his batting average is 29.
Still, if you shut your eyes a moment and played out the day in your head you could just about imagine that he would be able to steer his team through this, the way he often used to be able to do when he was at his best. And then you opened them again.
Babar set himself for Robinson’s first ball. He seemed uncertain of whether or not to play it, and pulled his bat inside the line at the very last moment. The next delivery beat his outside edge, then he clipped the third through square leg to score his first couple of runs. Second over, Babar slashed at a short ball from Archer, but missed it. Third over, he was up against Gus Atkinson, and was beaten twice before squirting an edge away for four. In the fourth he was clean bowled by Josh Tongue for seven off 18 balls.
There was a grim predictability to all this. Pakistan have scored 171, 135, 110, 194 and now 133 in this series. If they’re bowled out cheaply again in their second innings here they will be the first team since the 19th century to be dismissed for under 200 in every innings of a three-Test series in this country. They are a broken side, and leading them is an impossible job. Babar, who is notionally one of their selectors, said he didn’t even know that the management were going to send him seven new players for this match.
“It was news to me,” Babar said when he was asked about it. “I found out after.”
It was one of those seven late replacements who came striding into the Test later in the day, when he came on first change from the City End. Bowler’s name? Who is this again? You needed to be a keen follower of Pakistani domestic cricket to have any real idea. Razaullah is 21, and only played his first game of big-time cricket last November when he made his debut for Peshawar in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, Pakistan’s main first-class tournament. Since then he’s played seven first-class matches, nine one-dayers, and seven T20s, and now, after being flown over for this one Test, here he was.
The first thing we found out about Razaullah was that he is a lashing bat, the second was that he is lightning quick, and the third was that he is richly gifted. His first three deliveries hurried Joe Root. Then his fourth came whistling in and beat the inside of Root’s bat as he dropped it in a late attempt to block the ball. It hit him on the front pad flush in front of middle stump. Root, bamboozled, called for a review which only confirmed what everyone else already knew. He was out LBW (again).
Razaullah had his first international wicket, and with it he gave every cricket fan in the ground a little glimpse of some of what they love about Pakistani cricket: the speed, the audacity, the vivacity, the immaculate hair. Later on he got another of them, Emilio Gay this time, with a 90mph delivery that flew off the inside edge of Gay’s bat as he tried to drive and clattered into his stumps.
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Pakistan has never, will never, lack for natural talent. Even when everything else is falling apart, another fine fast bowler turns up. Only, if you’ve a long memory, you might remember the way Naseem Shah and Shaheen Shah Afridi bowled here on their first tour of England back in 2020 and ask exactly why neither of them made it back here this year. You might ask what the Pakistani set-up has done for all the fast-bowling talent they have had come through in the past decade. You might look at what’s become of Babar’s batting over the same period.
And you might wonder what, exactly, lies along the road for Razaullah in the years ahead.
And the problem is, you probably know the answer.