Arise ye followers of Matt Bianco and the Boo Radleys. Your time has come. Good morning and welcome to live coverage of day two of the second Test between Pakistan and England at Multan which the hosts begin on 259 for five after Kamran Ghulam’s century on debut and a stand of 149 between him and the opener Saim Ayub. It’s a respectable score in normal circumstances, given they were playing on a day six pitch and the batsmen were repeatedly scratching and scraping great lumps of dirt out of the popping creases with their spikes.
And yet the match is pretty well poised. Scoring was never straightforward. England, used to going at four or, last week, five an over, kept Pakistan down to 2.87 by virtue of some excellent quick and swing bowling from the trio of Cuddies – Brydon Carse, Matthew Potts and Ben Stokes – plus the Ciderabad spin twins, Jack Leach and Shoaib Bashir. Sir Geoffrey Boycott of this parish always maintains that one should reserve judgment on a pitch until both sides have batted on it and though there was turn at times for Leach and Bashir, Pakistan’s rookies (Noman Ali with 47 wickets at 33.53 is their leading wicket-taker) face a daunting task against England’s dashers whatever their batsmen post.
This may be a hostage to fortune but it doesn’t look like a pitch that’s going to rag square, like Ahmedabad in Feb 2021 when England were flattened for 112 and 81 and Joe Root took five for eight as they skittled India for 145 in their first innings. It seems to me to be the kind of pitch on which Ben Duckett’s Heinz 57 varieties of sweeps and Joe Root’s wrists and Harry Brook’s astonishing array of strokes may well prosper. Throw that back at me if they crash and burn…
Source: telegraph.co.uk