With the second Test coming so soon after the first, Azhar must remind his players that they dominated
England for the majority of the match at Old Trafford
By reputation,
Pakistan are a chaotic and unpredictable team. The journalist Osman Samiuddin, who has spent years trying to make sense of them, once wrote a brilliant essay about those glorious moments when the players would sense something coming, would slip all of sudden into a higher gear, and inexorably wrest control of a game away from the opposition with a rush of quick wickets. “Waqar Younis calls these moments a tamasha, a spectacle, but also a cross between a rolling circus and a fair,” Samiuddin wrote. “It is a tamasha,” Waqar told him: “‘I swear to God, we used to say it, we used to talk about it like this. Chal para kaam, chaloji, pakro [‘It’s begun, come, grab on to it’]’.”
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