Before the start of the first Test in Leeds, Cricinfo ran a feature looking back at Pakistan's iconic 1987 Test win over England at Headingley. It was spearheaded by captain Imran Khan, and included famous contributions from Wasim Akram and Saleem Malik, among others.
It felt like a Pakistan team very far removed from the one on these shores this time around, and began venturing into Ship of Theseus areas when that same team put on one of its limpest displays in a devastating defeat inside less than two full days of cricket.
It is bleakly convenient, then, that the abstract philosophical idea of when a side becomes so vastly different enough to its original form it can no longer meaningfully be considered the same thing was so crudely given tangible shape by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB). The Pakistan side that began this tour will, quite literally, not be the Pakistan side that finishes it. Less than 24 hours after another heavy defeat that sealed the fate of the series, the PCB put out a statement announcing seven of its players had been axed from the Test squad.
Quietly buried in the final line was the casual update that the head coach, Sarfaraz Ahmed - in the role for five games - had also been "released" alongside fast bowling coach Umar Gul. They would be replaced by Pakistan's white-ball coaches Mike Hesson and Ashley Noffke. The seven that replaced the discarded players included, as the statement helpfully noted, five players with no Test experience at all, and another two with a combined 10 games between them; not only was this not the Test team that came to England, but in many ways not a Test team at all.
At this point, it is difficult to justify calling the group of travellers who don the Pakistan colours a real team that carries any consistent link with those emblematic Pakistan teams of the past. The Pakistan side has instead become the PCB's instrument of administrative rage, mirror of its own impotence, and plaything for its sadistic cruelty. The performative punishments so regularly inflicted upon its players range from the sudden, if brief, removal of all NOCs following an Asia Cup defeat to India, to the fine, if ultimately unenforced, after defeat to the same side at the T20 World Cup this year. Given the howls of rage ultimately designed to deflect from the underlying truth that they have overseen a period of such rapid decline, it is difficult to see how it doesn't become terminal.
A couple of years earlier, the PCB chairman Mohsin Naqvi promised "surgery" of the Pakistan side after the 2024 T20 World Cup, but once more, the administration has reached instead for the cudgel of blunt destruction rather than any tools of forensic precision. That an example would be made of some players was, perhaps depressingly, expected. Imam-ul-Haq did not exactly set an example for bravery after failing to bat in either innings after a calf injury, and Mohammad Rizwan did not cover himself in glory with his impatient and bizarre shot selection. The axe was perhaps destined to fall upon them, but the collateral damage has been extensive.
Some players, such as Awais Zafar and Khurram Shahzad, were only being released because they did not expect to see action at Edgbaston in the third Test, though announcing their departure in the same breath as the sacking of two coaches and the hauling back of Imam and Rizwan was not ideal. Most astonishing, though, was the concurrent release of Ali Usman, the man who became the first overseas spinner to take a five-wicket haul at Headingley since 1972, which itself followed on from six wickets in a win over West Indies, and another five-wicket haul in Pakistan's warm-up fixture. In the Lord's Test, he was barely called on to bowl, sending down less than 12 overs across two innings. For those sins, he, too, finds himself frogmarched to the airport to take his seat on that flight of shame.
Even within the board's flawed understanding of what it means to run a competent cricketing set-up, there is little internal logic to help anyone make sense of the changes. Just two months ago, the PCB convened a press conference where they distributed a document among the media that detailed a new structure of central contract distribution for its players. Its central thrust focused on separating red-ball cricket contracts - and cricketers - from white-ball cricket, and viewed combining all three formats, and therefore, all-format contracts, as unfeasible in the modern game. Hesson himself was especially effusive about that document, calling it something that could potentially "become the envy of the cricketing world".
Those contracts have not yet been made public, or by all accounts even finalised, that Hesson has himself been thrust into coaching the red-ball side, effectively becoming Pakistan's all-format coach. There was no real explanation for Sarfaraz being appointed head coach three months ago, and no justification for sacking him three months and six Tests later.
It is not the first time Pakistan's director of cricket Aaqib Javed has watched a Pakistan Test coach depart in such short order; Jason Gillespie lasted only five Tests, while Gary Kirsten, an ODI World Cup-winning coach, was gone before he'd coached a single ODI. In interregnum, Aaqib tried his hand at coaching himself, most famously over a disastrous Champions Trophy that Pakistan hosted last year; it took just five days for Pakistan to be knocked out. There is no sign that he will look upon yet another embarrassing debacle as in a failure of his own, as hermetically sealed, seemingly, from self-reflection as he is from the consequences of repeated failure.
There was a tendency in the past to laugh off the PCB's administrative chaos, or, in some ways, perhaps even relish it as the thing that gave Pakistan cricket its vitality and unpredictability. The challenges Pakistan cricket had to handle, or sometimes, created for itself, were merely hurdles they had to theatrically clear, like having to score a few extra runs against a steep DLS target, or bowl a few extra yorkers to overcome a recalcitrant home umpire unwilling to accept an lbw shout. Of late, though, the PCB's dysfunction has become so extreme these are no longer obstacles in some athletic colosseum Pakistan can overcome. It is a callous travelling circus, with a large administrative stick slowly beating its unwilling participants into submission.