England vs Pakistan 1st Test - Pakistan's abject fielding standards leave no place to hide

Ali Usman looped one up to Dan Lawrence‘s knee, so high and so slow the batter actually skipped out to play it. He somehow failed to connect, the ball hitting the front shin and deflecting to first slip. Lawrence was out of his crease, and Pakistan captain Salman Agha, ball in hand, celebrated as he waited for an umpiring decision, instead of taking aim from two yards away and running the batter out.

A moment later, as game-awareness made its way into the Pakistan captain’s consciousness, he aimed a panicked hurl at the stumps. He ended up whacking it straight into Mohammad Rizwan’s rear, who by now was shielding a large section of the stumps from his team-mate’s line of sight as he, too, appealed. The review failed to save their blushes; it had hit Lawrence outside the line.

It was the perfect snapshot of the attitude of this Pakistan side, and the Pakistan cricket set-up in general. Pakistan hoping for an outcome not in their power, while eschewing any effort to achieve that outcome through effort on their own part, no matter how minimal.

Late yesterday evening, Joe Root had clipped Khurram Shahzad to square leg for a couple, or what should have been a couple. But Mohammad Abbas, positioned there to mop up precisely that kind of shot, trudged a few paces away from the ball, before deciding he would rather witness it hitting the ropes than actually cut it off.

There might be some mitigating circumstances for Pakistan’s 36-year old bowler, well into a ten-over spell, but today, they showed these are simply the standards they set for themselves now. Across a truncated day of play, Pakistan’s fielders appeared more allergic to diving than an aquaphobe on a springboard. Mohammad Ali just about ran past one as it trickled to the boundary under his watchful eye.

At least three other fielders opted to stick a foot out rather than actually bend down, on occasion to tragicomic results. When Harry Brook cut one to deep third, Usman Ali’s left boot stopped the ball, only for his right shin to then knock it back into the boundary.

“There’s no excuse for it,” Usman admitted. “We should put in more effort. There were lapses in the field today and it cost us runs.”

It was almost as if runs weren’t especially important to Pakistan; England were by this stage exactly 100 ahead with more than half their side in reserve. But this was a day of Pakistan demonstrating their mediocrity extends well beyond the weakness of their batting, the slowness of their pace attack, or the fragility of their mentality. Those have only shielded the continuing slide in Pakistan’s fitness and fielding, matters they have full rein over, and cannot be blamed on the inequities of cricket, the vagaries of the toss, or the systemic flaws of their domestic structure.

None of that has any bearing on Ali watching Brook drive a ball three yards away from him at mid-on, and somehow contrive to slide clumsily over it. Or, when Brook had just got off the mark after Pakistan had taken two wickets in five balls, Salman shelling a regulation catch at second slip.

Like so much in Pakistan cricket, fielding has been viewed as an afterthought, and it’s little surprise that attitude has spilled over onto the field. Five weeks ago – and just a week before Pakistan flew out to the Caribbean – their fielding coach Shane McDermott quit ten months into a three-year contract. There was no public indication that much of value had been lost, or that it needed high-quality replacing. Instead, Pakistan promoted Mansoor Amjad from the Under-19 setup with little fanfare, or any even a cursory visible attempt at a wider recruitment effort.

A level of managed decline has pervaded the Pakistan set-up ever since a disgruntled Steve Rixon walked away eight years ago, but it feels like a particular waste at this point in time. The current PCB set-up enjoys a greater level of administrative and political autonomy than perhaps any in decades, and have not been shy to commit huge sums of money on projects they deemed important.

Just two years earlier, the PCB increased the prize pool of a domestic one-day competition ten-fold, and committed to paying the mentors for each side nearly half the value of their broadcast deal over a two-year period. They hired, and then sacked, at great expense, Jason Gillespie and Gary Kirsten. Despite Pakistan’s continuing underperformance across formats, there is no pressure from the top on the administration itself. It is not for want of resources or power that the malaise in Pakistan’s fitness standards has not been stamped out.

It is the one thing any side enjoys complete control over: the fitness standards they enforce, and the fielding that invariably stems from it. In an era where control is in abundance at the PCB, it feels pointedly like something they have done to themselves rather than something that simply happened to them. Headingley left them no hiding place, but the rot has been visible closer to home for some time.

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