Back before he was a deposed Prime Minister, or a sitting Prime Minister, or an aspiring Prime Minister, before he was the captain of the Pakistan national team, or one of the greatest players in the game, Imran Khan was, for a short while, a talisman, a very English kind of bowler. You know the type; Calculated effort, fast to moderate, small seams, slight swing, licks lips when it’s cloudy. It was a game he learned as an 18-year-old at RGS Worcester and then perfected over four years playing cricket six days a week in Worcestershire, where a senior professional told him he had to stop fooling himself that he would be fast if he wanted to keep going. The game.
And because he’s Imran Khan, he was good at it too. He took 68 wickets at the age of 26 in 1973, 60 at 30 in 1974, and 46 at 27 in 75. He then returned to Pakistan. Suddenly, Khan found that most of what he had spent four years learning was of little use on the slow, low, flat courts they played on at home. “That trip to Pakistan made my decision. From then on, I was going to be a fast bowler or nothing,” Khan later wrote. He learned, as Othman Sami al-Din wrote in his book The Unquiet Ones, that “the road of the English was no road at all” in Pakistan.
There are reasons why many of the game’s great innovations, such as reverse swing, doosra and wobbly seam bowling, made their debut in Pakistan. There are also reasons why their cricket has over the years produced so many electric fast bowlers, ferocious spinners and brilliant seamers. The most important thing, in both cases, is that their stadiums require it.
England currently have two electric fast bowlers. The problem is that one of them, Mark Wood, is just starting to recover from injury, and the other, Jofra Archer, is just finishing his recovery. They have a wicked spinner too, but Adil Rashid, is so done with Test cricket that while England were away in Multan, he was (no joke) taking part in an Instagram Live to promote the company that makes a hair replacement treatment. They also had one of these great tailors, but Jimmy Anderson had finished playing a round of professional golf before he got flown out to do some coaching because he had retired.
So. Here comes Chris Woakes, then, with Gus Atkinson and Brydon Carse behind him, ready to learn the kind of lessons that Khan and so many other bowlers have learned over the years. Before this match, they had played 20 overseas Tests between them, only five of them in the subcontinent, and none of them in Pakistan. Naturally, all of these belong to WOX. Weeks’ record in home conditions is unparalleled, he says himself, but the truth is that it was only last year that everyone was under the impression that England had given up on the idea of selecting him to play abroad again.
Brydon Carse resumes on the opening day of the first Test in Multan. Photography: Stu Forster/Getty Images
Woakes is so English that he has spent most of his adult life waiting politely in line for the new ball. It has taken Anderson more than a decade to learn how to play in such conditions. Woakes, who is so magical in English conditions, has never had a chance as he has often been a first reserve. He might as well be there wearing a bowler hat and talking a little about the weather. He’s exactly the man you’d want on a cold spring morning at Lord’s; It’s not clear that he’s the one you need on a sweltering afternoon in Multan.
But needs are necessary. So it’s Weeks, Carse and Atkinson, supported by dear Jack Leach, holding on to his line and length like a pensioner holding the railing as he comes downstairs, and Shoaib Bashir, who still has an air of wanting to please. Child on work experience.
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Over tea, the five of them looked like they were on the second day of a bachelor party in Magaluf, their faces red, their shirts wet, and feeling existential regret for the remaining four days. Kars spent his first day in Test cricket huffing and puffing as he bowled chest-height bouncers at Shan Masood, who kept swaying away and directing the ball at leg-spin. It was like watching a heavyweight try to pick a fight with a dancing tube man in the garage’s front yard.
Two years ago, England won in Multan, but they had the pace, Wood, the experience of Anderson and the intelligence of Ollie Robinson. With the best will in the world, Woakes, Carse and Atkinson are the Bootleg Beatles compared to these three. Two years ago, they had Ben Stokes’ chemical leadership too, thanks to his happy-go-lucky knack for conjuring match-winning performances from his players by simply slapping them on the back and putting nine fielders in catch positions. Who knows? They may win this series, but they will have to go a long way to do so and learn a lot about how to play ball along the way.
