Back before he was an ousted prime minister, 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. It was a game he learned as an 18-year-old at RGS Worcester and then perfected over four years of six-day-a-week county cricket for Worcestershire, where he was told, by a senior pro, that he ought to stop fooling himself that he was ever going to be fast if he wanted to get on in the game.
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”. He learned, as Osman Samiuddin wrote in The Unquiet Ones, that “the way of the English was no way at all” in Pakistan.
There are reasons why so many of the game’s great innovations, like reverse swing, the doosra, and wobble-seam bowling, first evolved in Pakistan. There are reasons, too, why over the years their cricket has produced so many electric fast bowlers, wicked spinners, and ingenious seamers. The big one, on both counts, is that their pitches demand it.
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 (no joke) taking part in an Instagram livestream to promote the firm doing his hair replacement therapy. They had one of those ingenious seamers, too, but Jimmy Anderson was finishing playing in a golf pro-am before flying over to do some coaching because he has been railroaded into retirement.
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. Woakes’ record in home conditions is peerless, as he says himself, but the truth is that it was only last year that everyone had the impression England had given up on the idea of ever picking him to bowl overseas again.
Woakes is so very English that he’s spent most of his adult life politely waiting in line for the new ball. It took Anderson over a decade to learn how to bowl in conditions like these. Woakes, who is wizardly in English conditions, simply hasn’t had the chance because he’s so often been first reserve. He may as well be out there wearing a bowler hat and making small talk about the weather. He is exactly the man you want on a cool spring morning at Lord’s; it’s less clear that he’s the one you need on a sweltering afternoon in Multan.
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.
By tea, the five of them looked as if they were on the second day of a stag-do in Magaluf, all red faces, wet shirts and existential regret about the four days left ahead. Carse spent his first day of Test cricket huffing and puffing as he hurled down chest-high bouncers at Shan Masood, who kept swaying away and steering the ball to leg. It was like watching a heavyweight trying to start a fight with a dancing tube man on a garage forecourt.
Two years ago England won in Multan, but they had Wood’s pace, Anderson’s experience and Ollie Robinson’s nous to draw on. With the best will in the world, Woakes, Carse, and Atkinson are the Bootleg Beatles compared to those three. Two years ago, they had Ben Stokes’ alchemical leadership, too, with his happy knack of conjuring match-winning performances out of his players simply by slapping them on the back and putting nine men in catching positions. Who knows? They may yet win this series, but they’re going to have to take the long way around to do it and learn a lot about how to bowl along the way.
