Naseem, playing his first Test in over a year following a long-term injury, bowled 27.3 of those overs, taking 3 for 93. “We need to be honest,” he said. “It’s been too many series where we get these types of pitches. The groundstaff tried their best to make this pitch good for bowling, but perhaps because of the heat and sunshine there isn’t much help from the pitch. We need to think about how to extract home advantage, because you have to find a way to produce results from these games, otherwise you’re not utilising home advantage.”
Pakistan’s home results, too, have nosedived; they last won a home Test during that 2020-21 South Africa series, and have lost four and drawn the other four since.
All this has left Naseem wondering if Pakistan need to rethink their approach to Test cricket at home. “The bowlers have put in effort,” he said. “I’m playing a Test after more than a year and took me time to find my rhythm. The kind of weather we have right now, it’s extremely hot, and we didn’t get the kind of help from the surface as a bowling unit as we expected.
“If we’re incapable of making the sort of pitches that help fast bowlers, then we should look at whether we can produce spin wickets. However you do it, you need to use home advantage. People come to enjoy Test cricket in this heat, so you need to entertain them. What shouldn’t happen is you’re on the field at home and thinking this is hard work. The more you keep cricket entertaining, the better. It’s something we need to seriously think about.”
That the series is being played in August doesn’t help, either, with heat and humidity combining to dry out surfaces. This one in Rawalpindi was left to bake under the sun before the match got underway, with early morning rain forcing a delayed start. Pakistan’s jam-packed winter schedule, as well as Bangladesh’s scheduled tour of India in September, meant this sub-optimal window was the only one left in which these two Test matches could be accommodated.
Naseem, though, believes there isn’t enough in the surface for spinners, either, rendering, in his way, questions over Pakistan’s selection moot. “We believed the fast bowlers would get plenty of help here. But what we were expecting didn’t exactly happen. With four fast bowlers, your mindset is to take wickets with the quick balls. However, I don’t think it’ll spin either, because there’s grass on the pitch. But the pitch is very dry underneath, and the ball isn’t getting much help off the grass because of that, even if it appears like it might off the surface.”
While there has been a bounty of criticism of Pakistan’s pitches from outside, this is the first time the call has come so loudly and clearly from inside the house. That Naseem, arguably Pakistan’s best Test bowler, has been reduced to wondering if trying to produce pace-friendly pitches in Pakistan is worth it after all, the urgency to fix what appeared to have been broken in 2022 has never felt more pressing.