Key events
Heatwave my arse! It’s a brisk 18 degrees at Headingley, with a chance of showers later in the day. We should stress this is a meteorological term, not a comment on England being a shower of the absolute variety.
Preamble
And now for something completely different. A new era starts at Headingley today, one in which England will play sober, wiser cricket. Some will say this is all tish and fipsy, that Joe Root and Stephen Fleming’s England won’t be that different to Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum’s team. They’d be right, but a) John Cleese never uttered the phrase “and now for something partially different” and b) the branding and image of Root’s team, the thing that really matters in modern life, will be completely different.
Bazball was christened before it had even been born; Cricinfo’s Andrew Miller intuitively sensed what was about to happen and coined the phrase a few days before England’s first Test against New Zealand four years ago. No equivalent sobriquet has been forthcoming this time, and not only because Flemball sounds like an issue for your friendly local pharmacist rather than the cricket cognoscenti.
Fleming doesn’t officially start as coach until the winter, so Root and Marcus Trescothick will be in charge for the three-match series against Pakistan. On paper it’s the softest of landings against arguably the weakest Pakistan side in decades. That team still managed to beat England in 2024-25, aided by some fine spin bowling and a few industrial-strength heaters, but their away form puts the LL in appalling. A win in Trinidad earlier this month ended a run of eight straight defeats.
Pakistan can still trouble England, particularly when Mohammad Ali and the peerless Mohammad Abbas are wobbling the ball at 77mph with the keeper up to the stumps. (As regular readers will know, the OBO loves Rob Key, but the poor guy’s life has turned into a horror film called Night of the Living Dobbers, in which he is barricaded in a farmhouse surrounded by zombiefied incarnations of Michael Neser, Matt Henry, Scott Boland, Nathan Smith and, most terrifyingly of all, Darren Stevens.)
Abbas and Ali should induce at least one middle-order shemozzle over the next few weeks. Even so, it’ll be a surprise if England don’t win this series 3-0 and a major shock if they don’t win it at all.
The fixture list gets bloody difficult after this – South Africa away, Bangladesh away and at home, Australia away and at home, India away – so England could do with a nice, quiet, peaceful series. The sort they always have against Pakistan.