Pakistan Sent Seven Players Home and Accidentally Found a Number Nine Who Hits Nine Sixes

The fourth ball

Razaullah is 21. He is from Mardan. Before Wednesday he had played eight first-class matches, a couple of games in the PSL for Rawalpindi in which he took three wickets, and a lot of cricket in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that nobody outside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa watched.

His fourth delivery in Test cricket hit Joe Root on the pad. England's captain, lbw, to a boy whose entire first-class career would fit inside one English season. He finished with four wickets, for 148, off 23 overs, which is the bowling figures of someone nobody told to stop.

He was one of three debutants. Pakistan had sent seven players home, replaced the head coach and the bowling coach, opened an internal investigation into their own tour, and gone to Edgbaston with a side assembled by a process best described as shaking the tin out.

The summer he was supposed to have

Here is the part I cannot get over.

He had signed to play club cricket in England this summer. Cleethorpes. He was going to spend 2026 bowling on the Lincolnshire coast at people like me, in a league where the tea is the best part of the afternoon, and instead he was called into a national camp in May and has now hit nine sixes in a Test match at Edgbaston.

There is a story going round, which I read in Gulf News and which nobody has put their name to, that when the call came he did not have a passport, that his phone was switched off when the selectors rang, and that in the end a coach was sent to his village to tell him in person. I cannot stand it up. I am telling you where I read it and that nobody has claimed it, because if it is true it is the best thing that has happened in cricket this year, and because a system that could not reach a man by telephone found him anyway.

Somewhere there is a Cleethorpes fixture secretary who has had a very strange fortnight.

Nine sixes, batting nine

Pakistan were bowled out for 133 on the first day. England made 453. The match was a formality and the formality had been pre-written, by me among others.

Then Razaullah came in at number nine and made 81 off 63 balls with nine sixes and four fours. Nine sixes on Test debut equals Tim Southee's record. He put on 121 with Mohammad Abbas, who made 42 and who is 36 and who has spent his career being the best thing about tours like this one. Pakistan reached 449 and set England 130.

I bat nine. I have batted nine for fifteen years. Batting nine means you are in the team for something else and everyone has agreed not to discuss your batting. It means you arrive with the game decided and you swing because swinging is the only thing left that is yours.

A number nine hit nine sixes in a Test match this week. He got a standing ovation at Edgbaston and said afterwards that he enjoyed it. Of course he enjoyed it. Nobody at number nine has ever been applauded by 20,000 people for anything.

The uncomfortable bit

Cricinfo's line on all this was that the debut sums up Pakistan's mismanagement, and they are right, and that is the problem.

Razaullah exists in this Test because the PCB panicked. Seven players went home. Two coaches went home. A selector resigned in protest. The board is currently investigating itself about the conduct of a tour it is still on. Every one of those decisions was indefensible, and one of them produced the best debut of the year.

So the lesson is that the process worked, and the lesson is also that there is no process. Both are true at once, which is Pakistan cricket, and which is why people who say they have stopped caring about it are lying.

England knocked off the 130 for the loss of two wickets and took the series 3-0. Nobody will remember the chase. That is not me being clever. Ask anyone in a year what happened at Edgbaston and they will tell you about a number nine from Mardan.

Things I loved

Markets that do not exist but should