England and Pakistan start their Test series at Headingley with Babar Azam ruled out of the opener by a hand injury, a late twist that leaves Pakistan without their captain and senior batter at the worst possible moment. Salman Ali Agha will take his place when the match begins.
It is the sort of matchup that should have come with a permanent trophy long ago. England and Pakistan have been playing Test cricket against each other since 1954, but the rivalry still has no named prize attached to it, even as sponsor-branded trophies are handed around the international calendar. This series begins in the middle of that odd absence, and it begins with both sides carrying their own mess.
Pakistan arrive with the kind of record that explains why the line-up change matters. They were one place off the bottom in the International Cricket Council World Test Championship after taking the wooden spoon last time, have lost 13 of their past 18 Tests and only recently stopped a run of eight straight away defeats with a 1-1 series draw in the Caribbean. Babar, meanwhile, has gone 36 innings without a century, so his absence removes not just a captain but the one player who still carries the weight of expectation every time he walks out.
England are not exactly welcoming Pakistan to calm waters. They were beaten by New Zealand in June, dropped to seventh in the nine-team World Test Championship table and are deep into what has been called a semi-reset after a poor Ashes winter. Ben Stokes has jumped ship, Brendon McCullum has lost half of his job as head coach, and Joe Root is back as senior batter with the blunt reminder that he is a very different person and cricketer now than he was four years ago.
That is the friction at the heart of this series: England are often treated as the more settled side, yet the June defeat to New Zealand left them looking even more scrambled than before, while Pakistan have spent the past five years cycling through 11 head coaches and team directors across the men’s game. The result is a meeting between two teams that keep talking about direction while still looking for it. Headingley gets the first answer, but it is hard to see either side leaving with the sense that the deeper problems are solved.
What comes next is less about a trophy name than about survival through the series. Pakistan will hope Salman Ali Agha can steady the opening match without Babar, and England will try to turn a semi-reset into something more convincing before the pressure grows again. For now, the only certainty is that England Vs Pakistan starts with both teams looking far less stable than the fixture name suggests.
