During the first Test between England and Pakistan at Headingley, umpire Allahuddien Paleker seemed to wait an eternity as he pondered over Ollie Robinson's appeal, but ultimately raised his finger. Saud Shakeel looked at it with a kind of mute horror, and then took an even longer time before finally asking for it to be sent up for review.
It had been so long, though, that Chris Gaffney, the square-leg umpire, had found the time to amble up from square leg, and tell Shakeel he had waited too long. As Shakeel walked back, the big screen flashed up Hawkeye; Robinson's delivery was indeed flying over leg stump.
Shakeel may have felt unlucky, but he was, by no means, the only middle-order Pakistan batter who would fall cheaply. The collapse that began with Shakeel's dismissal saw Pakistan lose their last seven wickets for 54 runs. In the second innings, when Shakeel somehow picked out a man standing in a position just behind leg stump so obscure it doesn't really have a name, it triggered another implosion that saw Pakistan lose 7 for 67.
The reasons for Pakistan cricket's troubles may be myriad, but its consequences have played out in strikingly familiar fashion. Over the last decade, the stench of that rot within Pakistan's Test side has moved, almost with lethal precision, from one discipline to the next, sucking each bright spark dry to leave behind the husk that yielded that performance at Headingley.
Last time Pakistan were there, they brought with them two of the most exciting fast bowlers in Shaheen Shah Afridi and Naseem Shah, who spent the last week in Multan rather than in Leeds, bowling in an off-season domestic one-day competition. They had one of the best Test batters in the world, one who still leads the side but has not scored a Test hundred in four years. And almost exactly ten years ago, Pakistan arrived in London and swept aside the hosts to claim the Test mace. Currently, they sit at the bottom of the World Test Championship (WTC) points table.
In the past two years, that decline has finally come for one of the increasingly scarce positives within this Test side - their lower middle order. Since Babar Azam's loss of form in red-ball cricket, Pakistan's batting has been held up by the men that follow him out, inoculating the side against imploding prematurely and exposing the feeble lower order that lay in wait almost as cannon fodder.
Much of that came down to two men fresh out of Pakistan's much maligned domestic structure in Shakeel and Salman Agha, and the ever-improving Mohammad Rizwan, who briefly became Pakistan's most consistent batter. It was why we framed Pakistan's lower-order collapses by how many runs they lost their last four or five wickets for, rather than seven or eight wickets, as at Headingley.
Agha and Shakeel got their call-ups to the national side late, giving them years to cut their teeth on Pakistan's red-ball circuit. In a period from the start of 2021 to September 2024, batters in the national side had faced a collective 12,642 balls in domestic red-ball cricket; Agha and Shakeel accounted for nearly 37% of them on their own. It was a solid base to build an international career on, one both had begun impressively.
With Rizwan averaging over 40 over a two-and-a-half-year period between December 2023 and May 2026, it could sometimes feel like Pakistan's batting only really began once the top order was out of the way. Between July 2022, when Agha made his debut, and December 2024, Pakistan's batters from Nos. 5 to 7 averaged just under 40 runs per dismissal, the second-best of all Test nations.
But proximity to the national side is not so much the Midas touch as it is the kiss of death. Shakeel made a splendid start to an international career of what appeared to be a solid technical base; he reached double figures in each of his first 15 innings, and averaged 77.25 at the time. He has averaged under 29 in the 31 innings that came after, and briefly lost his place in the team for their tour of the West Indies.
As Agha's value to this side has grown, his contributions for it have shrunk. As the bulwark for Pakistan's fragile lower-middle order, he carved out a uniquely useful role within Pakistan's Test side, shepherding the tail as he took care of the run-scoring. By October 2024, Agha averaged just under 49 across his first 30 innings, but the second half of his career is a remarkable inversion: just 518 runs in his last 22 innings at 23.50.
There isn't much shepherding going on either; while Agha remained unbeaten in one-fifth of his innings in that first period, he has been dismissed in every innings he has played since.
Rizwan might have offered some cursory resistance as Pakistan headed for oblivion on that third afternoon in Leeds, but it was an innings without conviction, strategy, or, indeed, value. He occasionally held the strike away from the tailenders at the other end, while inexplicably taking singles off the first ball in other overs.
Rizwan's dismissal, a hack off the rips that crossed formats to sneak its way into his Test repertoire, was more representative of his more recent performances - ungainly, confused and unsure about his role, or indeed place, in the side. His average, too, has sunk over the last year, down below 30 in his last 28 innings.
All of that was crystallised into Pakistan's wretched display at Headingley; with the lower-middle order dam breached, the floodgates opened far more devastatingly, sweeping aside nearly the whole of Pakistan's batting line-up with it. During the current WTC cycle, Pakistan batters from Nos. 5-7 now contribute just 24.64 runs per wicket. It is, by far, the worst among all WTC-competing nations; South Africa, second from bottom, are more than four runs better.
Pakistan are now a side with the worst numbers for an opening partnership in the last two years, a batter in Babar who has been fading for some time, the weakest pace attack in a generation, and statistically the poorest lower middle order with the bat. All of these were strengths for Pakistan in the not-too-distant past.
Pakistan would have been aware that it couldn't all hold up when Misbah-ul-Haq lifted the Test mace at Lord's, the venue of the second Test against England, ten years ago. But what has followed hasn't quite been a regression to the mean as much as a descent into the abyss.