The England v Pakistan second Test week began not with a team sheet but with a statement of intent about behaviour. Two days out from Thursday’s start at Lord’s, Joe Root was due to address the weekend’s Derby incident involving one of his contracted seamers, ESPNcricinfo reported. England go into the match one up in the three-match series after an innings victory at Headingley. Almost nobody has spent the past 48 hours talking about the cricket.
England v Pakistan second Test: the selection questions
England’s squad has already been altered. Brydon Carse was stood down and replaced by Hampshire’s Sonny Baker after the England and Wales Cricket Board referred the weekend’s events to the independent Cricket Regulator, though as the Guardian noted, Carse was not expected to play barring an injury.
That is the point worth holding on to. The attack that won at Headingley is intact, and it is hard to construct an argument for changing it: Ollie Robinson and Josh Tongue shared ten wickets on the opening day, and Ali Martin’s verdict in the Guardian was that the attack had “crackled” and put smiles back on faces. A Lord’s surface that historically rewards seam movement should not change that thinking. The harder question is whether a batting order still bedding in a new number three can build a total when the ball does more than it did in Leeds.
Pakistan have run out of excuses
For the visitors, Lord’s is less a Test than an audition. Martin described the first Test as a “jarring mismatch” and noted that people had started asking whether this is the weakest side to tour these shores in years — the sort of question no touring team shakes off quickly. The BBC’s Test Match Special podcast gave a segment to exactly that: whether Headingley said something structural about the health of Test cricket in Pakistan rather than about one bad week.
There was one clear exception. Ali Usman’s five wickets were the only real Pakistani comfort of the match, and the tourists’ most obvious route back into the series is to give him support at the other end and a total worth defending. Whether they change the side to do it is not yet clear; no squad news has emerged from the Pakistan camp.
A head coach 11,000 miles away
Behind both of those questions sits an odder one about who is actually running England. Root is captain, Marcus Trescothick has been in interim charge of the Test side, and Martin reported that the incoming head coach, Stephen Fleming, has so far been working with the team by Zoom from 11,000 miles away. Brendon McCullum remains in post in the white-ball job only.
Writing in the Guardian on Tuesday, Mark Ramprakash argued that Fleming needs to be physically present to set and enforce standards, citing Andrew Strauss’s intervention on the 2017-18 Ashes tour, when the then director of England cricket flew out and addressed the squad after an incident involving Ben Duckett. “Nobody left that room in any doubt about where they stood,” Ramprakash wrote of that meeting. His point is that a coach on a video call cannot do that job.
All of which leaves Thursday at Lord’s carrying more than a result. England have the better team, the better bowling and the lead. What they have not had all summer is a week in which the cricket was the story — and the surest way to get one is to win the second Test so convincingly that nobody has time to look elsewhere.
