I wrote most of this piece before the third Test at Edgbaston finished, certain of how it would end. It has ended now — England by eight wickets, a 3-0 sweep, their first home whitewash of Pakistan in Test history. I was right about the result. I was wrong about how it would get there, and that gap between what I expected and what actually happened is, in a strange way, the whole reason I'm still writing this at all.
So let me say the thing I've been circling for years now: watching Pakistan cricket surrender, series after series, has stopped feeling like the guilty pleasure it once was for an Indian fan. It has started to feel like a loss I share.
That sentence would have embarrassed me at twenty-five. It doesn't now.
My inconvenient second-favourite team
Here is the confession underneath the confession. I am an Indian cricket fan, which is supposed to come with a fairly simple instruction manual where Pakistan is concerned: you want them to lose, always, preferably badly, and you certainly don't sit around admiring them. I have never quite managed to follow that manual, and at this point in my life I've stopped pretending I will.
Pakistan has been my second-favourite team for as long as I've kept this blog, and if I'm honest about the stadiums rather than the television screen, I may have watched them live more often than I've watched India. Exile did that — a decade of their "home" fixtures relocated to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah put their cricket within a short flight of wherever I happened to be, closer and more available than an Indian home series ever was. I went for the away team, essentially, over and over, and never quite admitted to myself why. I think I know now. It was the Sufism. It was never being sure which Pakistan would turn up, and wanting to be there when it did. That is a strange thing to write as an Indian, and I'm writing it anyway.
Nineteen years of watching the other side
I have been writing about Pakistan cricket on this blog since 2007, which means I've spent nearly two decades doing something a fair number of my countrymen would consider slightly disloyal: paying closer attention to Pakistan's eleven than most Pakistanis I know pay to India's. I watched them when hardly anyone outside Lahore or Karachi bothered to, because for most of that stretch Pakistan wasn't really playing "at home" at all. After the 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan team bus, international cricket simply stopped coming to Pakistan, and an entire cricketing nation went into exile.
I was there for one of the strange, quiet landmarks of that exile: the first Test match at the newly built Dubai International Cricket Stadium, Pakistan against South Africa in November 2010. It should have been a footnote — a neutral-venue draw, Younis Khan grinding out a match-saving hundred on a placid pitch. Instead it felt like something else entirely: a cricket board and a cricket team finding a way to exist without a home ground, and somehow still producing skill and stubbornness worth travelling for. I remember thinking, sitting in that half-full stadium under the floodlights, that this team had a resilience that had nothing to do with resources or structure. It came from somewhere else.
That "somewhere else" is what I used to call Sufism, half-jokingly, in posts on this very blog through the early 2010s. Watching Saeed Ajmal work over English batsmen — the doosra arriving from a hand and a face that gave away nothing, the batsman committing to the wrong shot before the ball had even pitched — never felt like conventional off-spin to me. It felt like misdirection as a spiritual practice. Abdul Qadir before him, Mushtaq Ahmed in between, and then Ajmal: mystery spinners who didn't just take wickets, they unsettled certainty itself. I wrote, more than once, that Pakistan's cricket had an unpredictability that felt almost devotional — you never knew which Pakistan would turn up, the one that would fold in a session or the one that would produce a spell or an innings that defied every metric. I enjoyed that Sufism more than I have ever comfortably admitted in person to other Indian fans. On this blog, at least, I can say it plainly: I have never managed to hate this team, and I stopped trying some years ago.
Edgbaston: too little, arriving too late
I expected a whitewash, and a whitewash is what Pakistan got. But the manner of it needs setting down properly, because it was not the flat, one-note capitulation I'd braced for while drafting the rest of this post.
Pakistan were bowled out for a wretched 133 in their first innings, conceding a lead well past 300 and staring at what looked like a third innings defeat in three Tests. And then, with almost nothing left to play for except pride, the unpredictability I'd been mourning showed up uninvited. Shan Masood made 95, Babar Azam 76, Azan Awais 59 — a proper top-order rearguard, the kind this batting line-up hasn't managed all series. But it was the bottom of the order that turned a respectable fightback into something closer to theatre: a 21-year-old debutant, Razaullah, playing with the carefree violence of someone who hadn't yet been taught to fear Test cricket, smashing 81 off 63 balls with nine sixes, and finding an unlikely ally in Mohammad Abbas — Pakistan's Player of the Series for his bowling — who top-scored with the bat in support for 42. Their ninth-wicket stand added 121 runs and dragged Pakistan to 449, turning a hopeless deficit into a 129-run lead and setting England a target rather than handing them an innings win.
It didn't matter, in the end. England lost both openers without scoring in the first over of the chase, wobbled at 2 for 2, and then simply outlasted the moment — Joe Root unbeaten on 62, Jordan Cox unbeaten on 59, the target of 130 chased down in under twenty-five overs by lunch on the fourth day. The series finished 3-0. But for about a day and a half, Pakistan had reminded everyone, including me, of exactly what I'd been writing about for two decades: a team capable of producing something out of nothing, right up until it wasn't enough. Too little, and far too late to save the Test or the series — but the too little still came, unscripted, from a No. 9 batting partnership nobody could have predicted before the match started. That is the closest thing to Sufism this series had to offer, and I noticed how relieved I was to see it, even in a losing cause.
The chest-thumping I can no longer stomach
And here is the part I actually sat down to write, before the match gave me a second thing to say. Every time a result like this lands, my timeline fills up with a certain kind of Indian cricket commentary — gleeful, contemptuous, treating Pakistan's institutional collapse as some kind of vindication. Memes about the PCB's revolving door of captains and coaches. Jokes about a board that seems to sack a head coach roughly as often as it changes its jersey sponsor. A tone that suggests Pakistan's cricketing misery is not a tragedy but a scoreboard, evidence in some larger, uglier argument about which country is doing better. Even Razaullah's debut fireworks got folded into that noise within hours — dismissed as "too little too late" by people who seemed almost annoyed that Pakistan had briefly made the result interesting.
I used to participate in some version of that chest-thumping myself, if I'm honest, in the years when an India-Pakistan match still carried the weight of two evenly matched sides going at each other. I don't anymore, and I think it's not just unpleasant, it's bad for the sport we claim to love. A rivalry needs two functioning teams to be a rivalry at all. Indian cricket does not become more meaningful by beating a hollowed-out opponent, and it never will. And as an Indian fan who has never actually managed to dislike this team the way I was supposed to, watching people celebrate its ruin has started to feel less like patriotism and more like a failure of imagination about what the game is for.
The lineage this dishonours
What makes it harder to watch is the company this current Pakistan team keeps, whether it wants to or not. This is the cricketing nation of Imran Khan, who turned a talented but undisciplined side into 1992 World Cup winners through sheer force of will. Of Javed Miandad, whose stubbornness at the crease was its own form of defiance. Of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, who between them didn't just take wickets, they invented a whole grammar of fast bowling — reverse swing as an art form, the old ball made more dangerous than the new one, a skill so distinctly Pakistani that the rest of the world spent a decade trying to catch up. That is an extraordinary inheritance. It is not a small thing to watch a team carrying that lineage need a stunning, unscripted innings from a teenager on debut just to make a Test respectable rather than embarrassing.
A team like its country
I don't think it's an accident, and I say this with real sadness rather than any satisfaction, that Pakistan's cricket team mirrors something about the state of Pakistan itself just now — the instability at the top, the sense of institutions being run for short-term survival rather than long-term health, enormous individual talent being let down by structures that can't hold it together for more than a season at a time. A cricket board that changes coaches and captains with the same restlessness a fragile government changes cabinets — this series alone reportedly saw a wholesale overhaul of squad and coaching staff after the Lord's defeat. Gifted young cricketers emerging from the same production line that gave the world Ajmal and Akram, only to be mismanaged, overexposed, or discarded before they fully arrive — except, every so often, one of them walks out at No. 9 in a lost cause and plays like Razaullah did, and you remember the production line still works, even when everything built around it doesn't. It's not a perfect metaphor — sport rarely maps cleanly onto politics — but it's hard to watch this series and not feel the resemblance.
What I actually want
So here is my confession, in full, on the record on this blog where I've been writing about Pakistan cricket since 2007: I want them to be good again. Not for sentiment's sake, though there's plenty of that in this post, but because the sport is worse without a strong, strange, unpredictable Pakistan in it — and because I am, apparently, constitutionally unable to root against them the way an Indian fan is supposed to. I have called them my second-favourite team before on this blog, and Edgbaston didn't change that, even in defeat. I would rather lose to a Pakistan side capable of producing another Ajmal, another Razaullah innings that makes no sense until it's too late, than beat one that has forgotten how to surprise anyone, including itself.
The series is over now, 3-0, exactly as bad as I feared and yet, for a day and a half, not quite as flat as I'd expected. I'll write about the scorecard properly at some point, because that's what this blog does. But I wanted to write this first — not a match report, just an old fan's uneasy, overdue admission that watching a rival fall apart has stopped feeling like victory, and started feeling like grief, and that the dilemma of feeling that way as an Indian is one I've stopped trying to resolve.
