A bowling line-up lacking in overseas experience must learn fast after enduring a chastening opening day in Pakistan
, or an incumbent prime minister, or an aspiring prime minister, back before he was the captain of the Pakistan national team, or one of the game’s great all-rounders, Imran Khan was, for a short spell, a very English sort of bowler. You know the type; measured effort, fast-medium, a little seam, a little swing, licks his lips when it’s cloudy out.
And, because he’s Imran Khan, he was pretty good at it, too. He took 68 wickets at 26 in 1973, 60 at 30 in ’74, and 46 at 27 in ’75. Then he went back to Pakistan. And Khan found, all of a sudden, that most of what he had spent four years learning wasn’t a whole lot of use on the slow, low, flat pitches they played on at home. “That trip to Pakistan made up my mind,” Khan wrote afterwards, “from then on I would be a fast bowler or nothing”.
These days England have a couple of electric fast bowlers of their own. The trouble is that one of them, Mark Wood, is just beginning a recovery from injury, and the other, Jofra Archer, is just finishing it. They have a wicked spinner too, but Adil Rashid, is so over Test cricket that while England were labouring away in Multan, he was taking part in an Instagram livestream to promote the firm doing his hair replacement therapy.
So. Here comes Chris Woakes, then, with Gus Atkinson and Brydon Carse behind him, ready to learn the sort of lessons Khan and so many other English-style bowlers have over the years. Before this match they had played 20 overseas Tests between them, only five of them on the subcontinent, and none of them in Pakistan. And of course, all of those belonged to Woakes.
But needs must. So Woakes, Carse, and Atkinson it is, backed up by dear old Jack Leach, gripping on to his line and length like a pensioner holding the handrail going downstairs, and Shoaib Bashir, who still has the eager-to-please air of a kid on work experience.
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