Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.)

A P Webster writes…

Any chance to visit a new cricket ground is hard to pass up, even if it’s only ‘new’ in the sense of not being one the person in question has visited previously. When it’s genuinely, actually, ‘new’ then the chance is even harder to pass up. And when the cricket ground in question is built adjacent to – and maybe even on – some land previously farmed by the family of the person in question, well, that’s no choice at all.

So it was that on a Thursday morning, about half an hour later than planned, ‘due to a member of train staff being unavailable’, my Dad and I (along with a group of other cricket fans, mainly of a demographic that made me feel quite young) hopped off the 111 bus which had transported us from Preston station to what was previously Woodcock Farm but is now very much the AO Farington Cricket ground. 

Before we even went through the new pedestrian gates, my Dad was (metaphorically) transported back to the 1960s, when he’d spent some time living with relatives in the area so as not to disrupt his education whilst his own Dad was working elsewhere.

In fact before we’d even got to the ground, the TARDIS-like powers of the Stagecoach conveyance had begun to take effect, as we passed the Morrisons Daily where, no doubt many changes of ownership previously, my Dad had lent someone his coat and never got it back.

After a fair bit of taking of photos of various buildings which either did, or notably didn’t, look like they had six decades previously, we made our way into the ground itself, making it through the extremely relaxed bag checks (Metal cutlery was not allowed in, and there was a pint cup full of it to illustrate the point, but soft drink cans were, almost unprecedentedly for a 2020s sporting event, considered fine to take in. Some people, I later discovered, had even managed to take some beer cans and a glass bottle of mediocre lager in), to survey the new ground in all its glory.

Our first task was to assess the food and drink situation. Like all right-thinking cricket attendees, I had made a packed lunch of Reuben-style poppyseed bagels and a couple of bottles of Irn Bru, and my Dad had his own food, but clearly the tea and beer situation required investigation.

Intelligence from the prior events at the venue as part of its testing and ‘soft launch’ had already prepared us for the lack of Proper Beer, but the worse news was that the more acceptable of the Non-Proper Beer was off-limits to non-members. As indeed was modern plumbing, with the non-members having to make do with portaloos – at least for the day we were there.

Our pre-match discussion of whether there was any way England could avoid having Joe Root as Test captain was interrupted by an announcement over the too-far-away-from-us-to-properly-hear tannoy that Joe Root had been confirmed as the England Test Captain.

> Craptain Part II: Where do you stand on Joe Root’s second coming?

Once play started, it was evident that on one side of the ground, the sight screen was insufficient to deal with the steady stream of new arrivals investigating various facilities, which led to a grumpy announcement along the lines of it being necessary for people to behave properly otherwise we’ll just stop playing cricket until you all think about what you’ve done. The stewards eventually implemented a system blocking the part of the path in question with a bit of tape during overs being delivered from that end.

During the innings break we went for a walk around the perimeter, during which my Dad attempted to make contact with the locals in case any of them had lived there for decades and remembered when his family lived nearby (and, I suspect, also to check whether Lancashire had put a plaque up to mark the spot where he had to count eggs and classify them by size).

The only people who seemed to be in their gardens were some young children who unaccountably didn’t seem to know much about how the area had changed since the 1960s, so we just did a loop of the ground then went back to our ‘loose’ seats (camping chairs having been deemed incompatible with comfortable bus and train transportation).

I’d taken a ‘Soft Sitter’ pad for my Dad (£12 from Dunelm – not bad value for those who struggle with what I am trying to resist the urge to call ‘hard stools’ but would more properly be called ‘plastic seating’). The bribe of Wine Gums that we had offered those in the row behind to watch our stuff had proved successful, so our seats and our bags were still there.

Transport timings and the call of Proper Beer meant that we left before the close of play for an okay pint in Lostock Hall (the barman deemed my beer selection an ‘excellent choice’ – a compliment slightly undercut by the fact that he repeated exactly the same phrase to the next person who selected a different beer), then two better pints near the station in Preston, where we followed the end of the game on Cricinfo before getting our respective trains home.

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Pakistan have decided that actually, with the benefit of hindsight, half of the players they picked for the first Test shouldn’t have even been in the squad. The apparently wrong calls for that match span the captain, the wicketkeeper, the opening batter and half the bowling attack – one of whom took a five-for the only time Pakistan bowled.

Needless to say the head coach and bowling coach have also been given the old heave-ho and at least one of the selectors has now called it a day too (as you would).

This is an impressively thorough renunciation of the wild opinions of two weeks ago. Perhaps further changes lie in wait pending a review of the Lord’s Test? One can only hope.

Our favourite detail in all of this is that the PCB has demanded that the selectors furnish them with a written explanation why they picked the guy who’d made the most runs at the highest average for Pakistan over the last two years.

Apparently this is a management hierarchy so steeped in the nuances of our sport that even that needs explaining to them.

And so it is that the plentiful and many-sided dice of Pakistan cricket have once again been launched into the air! What numbers will come up? What would be a satisfactory score? What are numbers anyway?

Pakistan presumably hope they’re rolling 12-sided dodecahedron dice and that large numbers will ensue. More likely they’ll roll a blank face, a minus symbol, a set of tentacles and something that – after first consulting a tightly folded scrap of paper they find in the box – they come to learn is the despair icon.

The third Test is still over a week away.

Is running Pakistan cricket honestly a realistic thing to attempt as a side hustle?

The Pakistan Cricket Board often seems perfectly geared towards getting the absolute least out of its players. It’s been such a colossally effective talent erosion machine in recent years, you wonder whether the guy running it should really be attempting it in his spare time when he’s already working 9 to 5 at something else.

Oh for the days when there was still one place uncorrupted by capitalism. But even that’s gone now. They’re fighting over it in fact. Hopefully it’s one of those battles to the death where everyone involved inflicts fatal damage on each other and there are no survivors. (No billionaire survivors anyway – we have nothing against the innocent astronauts, engineers etc.)

Capitalism’s been steering cricket since before the first coin toss of course, but perhaps a little more forcefully these last few years. We often avert our gaze from its impact when we persuade ourselves to not think about all the ‘white ball specialists’ absent from a given Test squad.

Frustratingly, the absentees are often the most dynamic players: the fastest bowlers, the hardest hitters, the weirdest and wristiest spinners. Surveying this Pakistan team, it’s tempting to diagnose this familiar division of labour as a central problem. But of course Pakistan are actually the nation least comprehensively punctured by the pointy Indian tip of franchise cricket.

How popular are all these Not-Quite-The-IPL franchise leagues actually likely to be?

There are a few factors in play, but Pakistan’s somewhat mehsome Test attack is at least to some degree a product of concerted mismanagement.

Mohammad Amir has taken the franchise road, but he is old now, whereas Shaheen Afridi and Naseem Shah are both technically available, but have been blundered into some measure of decrepitude by team management. Against that backdrop, Haris Rauf’s lack of interest in Test cricket smacks of being an act of self-preservation.

Have you ever worked two jobs? Whatever the hours, whatever the specific demands, it’s a tough ask. One of the great bullshit rebrandings of modern times is how it’s been made to sound all cool and go-gettery via the “side hustle” label when really it’s more commonly ordinary people backed into a financial corner through no fault of their own.

Doing two jobs is draining beyond the hours asked of you. You’re asking your brain to move between two different workplaces on top of the daily transitions to home life. These worlds have a way of bleeding into one another and if one of those environments is currently running, shall we say, less than smoothly, the effect is only magnified.

Tell you what workplace environment is a little bit suboptimal right now: Pakistan cricket.

Pakistan have had four chairmen since 2021: Ramiz Raja, Najam Sethi, Zaka Ashraf and now Mohsin Naqvi. Tidying up after that level of turnover would be a pretty sizeable undertaking as a first job, let alone a second.

Tell you what’s almost certainly an even more demanding job than Chairman of the PCB though: being Pakistan’s Minister of Interior and Narcotics Control – which just happens to be Mohsin Naqvi’s day job.

What a way to make a living.

Will Ollie Robinson actually manage to play two Tests in a row? The England Test team has been a swirling maelstrom of madness all summer long – maybe that will be the next improbable development.

As for the most recent England Test team development, its improbability lies only in how probable it felt. Of course someone from the squad found themselves in handcuffs while out drinking at 4am with the former captain.

Just weigh that feeling up. Implausible but also predictable. In many ways it’s a quite breath-takingly improbable level of probability given all that’s happened in recent weeks.

“It’s not the isolated incident itself,” commented Joe Root. “I think it’s the fact that we continually keep making stupid mistakes away from the game, and it’s detracting from what we’re doing on the field.”

Those relentlessly repeated isolated mistakes, eh Joe?

Root’s not the one to mock here though. He’s taken the right position on all this. “It doesn’t have to be rocket science,” he said. “As players you get judged on the decisions you make on the field and off it too.”

So the upshot is that Brydon Carse is unavailable for this Test match and probably some others too. If he’s comfortable with that sort of trade-off, he can crack on with arguing about spilt drinks and continue getting arrested and de-arrested to his heart’s content.

England’s other quick bowlers can opt to manage their bowling loads in a similar way too, should they see fit, but it’s probably not the route to a long and fulfilling international career. You can’t always rely on Robinson’s spine opening up a spot to allow you to get back in again afterwards.

For Pakistan, Babar Azam should be back, which is good news. Bowling coach Umar Gul said the captain had faced “fast bowlers” in the nets. He did not however reveal where the tourists had sourced such things.

Is a Pakistan Test cricket team devoid of fast bowlers truly a Pakistan Test cricket team?

The Lord’s pitch has not, in recent years, rewarded high velocity bowling anyhow – not unless you consider a single bounce before the ball arrives at the keeper to constitute a reward anyway. Which perhaps you do.

Perhaps this sponginess is deliberate. England have had quite enough of bouncers after all.

Pakistan have had plenty of fast bowlers with a touch of magic about them over the years. Unfortunately, that kind of transcendence would require an additional supernatural feat these days, because any act of high pace sorcery would first necessitate the shape-shifting transformation of a military-medium dobbler.

Selector and director of high performance Aaqib Javed said before this series that Pakistan had prioritised pace when picking their squad. At the time, this seemed an understandable position. Now we’re underway, the claim would be better labelled ‘perplexing, trending towards laughable’.

It’s no great surprise that Mohammad Abbas is trundling in at 120km/h, because that’s simply what he does and he has always made it work. Mohammad Abbas will trundle the shit out of you. Just how much force do you honestly need to apply when you’re sneaking up behind someone and slitting their throat? ‘Just enough’ is the answer.

The problem is that rather than complementing Abbas’s medium-pace with a fast bowler or two, Pakistan appear instead to be striving to compliment it by selecting “quicks” who are no such thing.

Khurram Shahzad started at 130km/h and slid. Mohammad Ali just about managed 135km/h a couple of times but ended up stinging like a butterfly, delivering a whole series of 125km/h bouncers.

“We are concerned with the pace of our fast bowlers,” Javed had said. “It is unacceptable that their speeds drop to 126kph on the second or third day of a Test, which was the case in Bangladesh.”

He was pretty clear on this. “We feel we need pace,” he said and revealed they’d used speed guns at a recent camp to decide who to pick for the West Indies and England.

This is the bit that gets us. Any nation (and especially Pakistan) can get a bit lost in the selection process. It happens. You turn up in a foreign country, unpack your suitcase and think, “Oh, blood and sand! We didn’t bring any fast bowlers!”

But Pakistan thought about this. They remembered. Fast bowlers were top of their list. Aaqib says he and his selectors identified them and packed them, and yet here we are. Only one guy in the attack has a plausible case to be considered even fast-medium, let alone fast – and even then, only when he’s fresh.

The Pakistan Cricket Board’s shambolic mismanagement of Shaheen Afridi is a widely accepted truth and most agree that Naseem Shah has been similarly blunted. But that’s only a couple of players. Pakistan is a big country. Where’s everyone else?

> What’s happening with Shaheen Shah Afridi’s knee?

When you look on this Headingley attack that is supposedly the product of actively prioritising pace, it’s almost as if the national board has put together a high friction talent funnel to enable it to mismanage at scale. Players enter it at speed and barely dribble out of the other end.

We once wrote about how the Pakistan bowling attack was not merely a group of cricketers, but a fundamental cricket concept. For us, for a time, The Pakistan Bowling Attack wasn’t just the best bowlers who represented the country, but the very foundations of the invaluable idea that a bad situation can be turned around with a moment of inspiration.

This current incarnation of the Pakistan bowling attack isn’t too far off being the exact opposite of that.

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Please tell us the secret of managing the very difficult emotions that arise when watching the Pakistan bowling attack against England

Some things change, but other things don’t. It’s still pretty likely that England will be able to win the one Test match Ollie Robinson is capable of playing each series. Perhaps they should schedule more two-Test series.

“It’s not often you get half a ball,” said Robinson after play yesterday. This is sort of correct in that they pretty much always come in pairs. 

He’s right that it’s an area where people don’t often do things by halves though. Perhaps this fractional moderation is a central pillar of Joe Root’s new strategy to persuade his men to become sensible adults. “Remember: half pints only now, lads.”

This particular bisection was because Robinson and Josh Tongue could both lay claim to the ball after taking five Pakistan wickets apiece. We haven’t yet heard what method the groundstaff employed though. Apparently the surgical procedure only took five minutes.

Speaking of surgery, it’s been reported that England’s first-choice all-rounder, Sam Curran, is out for the season with a groin issue. This means it’s halves for Root when it comes to his spin attack too.

As we laid out in our article on this earlier in the month, two half-spinners (Root and Dan Lawrence) do not actually add up to a full one. They are in fact only marginally more use than two detached halves of cricket ball.

This was no real issue on a damp day in Leeds in one of the Tests when Robinson was available – although even in those circumstances there was a brief period when Pakistan were about 90-2 when you started to think, “Okay, Joe, do you have half an idea what to do when this happens?”

Fortunately, on this occasion, Tongue’s idiosyncratic method of bowling from a left-arm angle despite using his right-arm again proved not half bad.

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1. Ha! As if! ︎

It’s hard to remember a Test match when England didn’t change their captain, or their coach, or both. Speaking of that sort of thing… Pakistan are in town!

A few months ago, Pakistan had the honour of becoming the first team to be whitewashed in successive series of two or more matches by Bangladesh. That doesn’t sound as damning as it perhaps did a week ago, but it’s only part of a longer-term trend. They haven’t won a Test series outside Asia since 2017.

They do however have Mohammad Abbas.

Given the tragically attenuating unpredictability of the Pakistan Test team, it’s hard to envision any kind of victory that wouldn’t hang off the aye-aye fingers of their foremost 30-something medium-pacer.

Then again, it’s barely rained in England for the last three months. Grass won’t grow overnight, despite a recent return to a more familiar level of precipitation, so maybe they’ll be able to stick with the Noman Ali and Sajid Khan and absolutely no other bowlers strategy that served them so well in 2024.

There’s certainly no denying they have the edge over England in the spin department for these first couple of matches.

What they sadly lack, however, is a reluctant captain who’s been press-ganged into leading the team again after not massively enjoying the job first time around. Unlike Joe Root, Babar Azam is injured after being hit in Beckenham (not a euphemism). Salman Agha will therefore take charge – whether willingly or unwillingly, we do not know.

Craptain Part II: Where do you stand on Joe Root’s second coming?

Dan Liebke’s anonymous former Australian cricketer has this Australia team down as a two-stroke pull-start Victa Commando lawnmower – “an absolute weapon of a thing” but also “an absolute shit of a thing to start”. Presumably that makes Bangladesh some sort of battery-powered Flymo. Halfway through a Test series, their opponents will be hoping the tourists are already out of charge.

The great thing about Australia’s defeat over the weekend is that the one guy they were almost certainly dropping at the point when they’d basically lost was the guy who then made a hundred before they’d actually lost.

Stellar stuff from Cameron Green: an exquisite blend of futility and self-preservation that wouldn’t have looked out of place from a 1990s England cricketer. There is no higher praise.

Somewhat bizarrely, Green’s Test batting average (33.69) moved above Ian Botham’s (33.54) with that second innings hundred. His bowling average is a little way off though. His 39 wickets at 39.82 in fact put him fractionally behind Allan Border with 39 wickets at 39.1. (A return that was sufficiently well calibrated to earn AB a mention in our feature on the best part-time bowlers in the history of Test cricket.)

Still though, Green’s surely ducked under the axe once more (no mean feat for a man of his stature). So who will that lethal blade strike instead?

The queue to not play Test cricket for Australia is an increasingly busy one, but we’d guess it’s currently headed by Marnus Labuschagne and Jake Weatherald. We’re not sure in which order.

Marnus? We know where we are with Marnus. The man’s turned just-about-playing-for-Australia into an art form over the last three years.

Weatherald though is another matter. He looked just horrible in the Ashes and this seems to have led him to reinvent his technique entirely. The end result is that he still looks just horrible, but now in a quite radically different way.

On top of this, there’s also zero chance Australia’s first-choice bowling attack is going to make it through the 20 (or 21) Tests scheduled over the next 12 months. If we’re honest, the fact they’ve got through one in a row is newsworthy, but you’d anticipate a far more meaningful brand of attrition than mere niggles and rest periods in the year ahead – Pat Cummins is the young scamp of the group at 33.

All in all, Australia are going to have to find some new players. Fortunately for them, they aren’t exactly short of Tests in which to trial them.

You can tell Joe Root’s done this before. When you’re entirely new to the job, it’s a tall order to get through a 25-minute interview without saying anything. That’s pretty much what he managed speaking to Mike Atherton earlier this week though.

Root says he’s not going to make the same mistakes as last time. He’s gained a whole different perspective over the last four years. He’s not going to rip things up; he’s going to fine-tune and build on what’s gone before.

This is the nature of things at this point though; when it’s all good intentions and theory. Root’s second coming as England Test captain is all nebulous and abstract right now, which means his answers can be too. Pressed on specifics from the past, he was inclined to fire up his smoke machine before inviting us to squint into a decidedly hard to decipher future.

None of this tells us much. But what else were we likely to get? It would be pretty wild to say you had every intention of repeating your previous mistakes. He was never going to criticise his friend and predecessor. Joe Root doesn’t make drop too many media clunkers – that’s why he’s in the job.

England’s freshly microwaved leader has made one decision though and he explained it perfectly.

Mandatory bedtime’s been put to bed. Because it doesn’t achieve anything.

“If you want guys to take responsibility on the field, they’ve got to feel like they can be grown adults off it,” was how Root put it.

“If you are afraid to trust, you will lose,” is the Rayden version.

Same-same.

What is a curfew but preemptive punishment for crimes not yet committed? In the continuing absence of ECB precogs, it’s also a frag grenade countermeasure where plenty of bystanders get peppered with shrapnel.

If you were Joe Root, with an almost entirely unblemished track record of making fully adult decisions for the entire duration of your incredibly long international career, you’d probably feel a bit put out if one day your boss said he was going to have to take control of your bedtime.

‘Why? Because I apparently can’t be trusted? Hmm, I think I might be immediately reversing this one as soon as I’m back in charge,’ you’d think.

Being a middle-aged batter does not automatically imbue a person with the tactical, strategic, psychological and empathetic qualities that make for a good Test cricket captain. Yet this is still for the most part how we pick them.

Don’t get us wrong, we love Joe Root. We love him as a batter and a bloke. If anything, we admire him even more for being willing to return to a job that makes his life unutterably miserable and for which he is demonstrably unqualified, simply because someone else feels that’s the best thing to do right now. 

We didn’t think much of Joe Root’s first stint as captain. He did the job for a long time and if anything only seemed to get worse at it as time wore on. 

There is a big and legitimate covid asterisk to that. Much of what he had to shoulder was irregular and he was also frequently hamstrung by Eoin Morgan’s limited overs teams getting first dibs on many of England’s best players. 

But he also – and there’s enough evidence to state this plainly – wasn’t any good. He was a wispy, ethereal leader, blown about by forces outside his control; a well-meaning ghost, who everyone liked, blighted by a fundamental incorporeality that prevented him from having any meaningful impact.

Unable to move on

Ghosts famously tend to be tethered to our earthly plane by unfinished business of course, so perhaps that’s what we’re dealing with here.

It would be quite lovely if Root could make use of everything he’s learned since that first stint as captain and write over some of those memories with better ones. Our issue is that we find it very, very hard to see that happening.

People can get better at things – that’s undeniable – but starting points matter. An ageing village cricketer isn’t going to become international standard given an extra net session or two each week – the gap to make up is just too great. He can improve, sure; he can learn things; but he won’t suddenly unearth the one central quality he truly lacks, which is any kind of natural aptitude for the job. 

We have no doubt Root will do things differently this time around. He won’t make some of the mistakes he made in the past. It’s just that quite often these mistakes he’s learned from will be mistakes that other captains would never have made in the first place.

Aptitude

As a batter, Joe Root soaks up experiences and processes them brilliantly. He has an incredible ability to work things out.

Why does Joe Root always seem to work it out and no-one else does?

For whatever reason, this preternatural ability does not extend – has never extended – to captaincy, where he routinely seems to lag three steps adrift, devoid of any abiding throughline which might shape his decision-making.

This was most apparent when Ben Stokes took over and everyone immediately started talking about how much fun they were having. The unavoidable implication of that was that everything before – playing under Root – had been dreadful.

The players feeling a bit better was only half of it though. England also starting winning almost every game in incredible style despite picking much the same guys who had previously been losing almost every game.

One aspect of that change was that the players suddenly felt wanted, supported and secure. Unlike Root, Stokes just very obviously had a feel for this side of the job. He didn’t say he thought a player was great before leaving them out of the next game. As much as possible, he picked guys and stuck with them. He embiggened Broad and Anderson; he backed Jack Leach and spin bowling more generally; he nursed Rehan Ahmed to success on his debut and he performed some kind of pig-headed magic trick with Tom Hartley.

Obviously, you can’t continue relentlessly backing people forever – players get old, players lose form – but you could see how empathy underpinned the way Stokes approached these things. It helped him get more out of people. England weren’t great, but Stokes’s captaincy made them a lot better.

Root just doesn’t seem to have these qualities. Or, more accurately, he lacks them in the context of leading his team-mates in cricket matches.

It’s often said Root has a strong sense of team-mates’ moods – the things that might be bothering them; what they might be worrying about. Maybe being the boss negates this somehow. Or perhaps the issue is that his default reaction is plain, straightforward sympathy rather than finding a way to address those feelings (or prevent them in the first place).

Being captain is perhaps more about shaping mental states than responding to them. Root has some black marks against him on this one. He is the captain who waged a campaign of unnecessary omissions to undermine Jack Leach until there was nothing much left of him, and he is also the man who said, “I think there are certain spells where he can just unleash a little bit more,” about a fast bowler whose bones he at that point seemed hell-bent on stress fracturing.

Root just doesn’t instinctively get this stuff. Nor much of the rest of it really. Only a few weeks ago, he showed he was still perfectly happy to spend a long hour failing to bounce out the lower order.

We love Joe Root. He really is a great guy. He is a man who doesn’t know anything other that to try his hardest and do his best and that is admirable. We doubt it’s occurred to him that by taking on the England Test captaincy and failing to force a different choice, he’s almost certainly making things worse.

But, you know – good luck to him. Hopefully Stephen Fleming and the other players can help him find peace.

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