Pakistan lost by 194 runs at Lord's. Lost the series 2-0. And then the actual chaos started.
Ahmer Naqvi and Osman Samiuddin sit down to make sense of a week in which the PCB flew seven players home mid-tour, called up five uncapped replacements for a dead rubber, released the head coach two Tests into a three-Test series, and issued a show cause notice asking selectors to explain by which "competent authority" they had selected Mohammad Rizwan — only Pakistan's highest Test run-scorer of the last two and a half years.
Also: there are two Mohammad Imrans in the system. Only one of them was supposed to get on the plane. Aap khud hi 2 aur 2 jod lijiye.
In this episode:
🎯 The PCB Bingo Card — show cause notice, emergency BoG meeting, captaincy change, coach change, military camp, record-breaking fine. How many squares has one tour already filled?
📉 Why StatsGuru is, sadly, not a competent authority
✈️ Saim Ayub: CPL hundred one week, Jofra Archer at Edgbaston the next. What could go wrong?
🧢 Pakistan's squad construction — four tail-enders, seven openers, no middle order. 2002 Brazil, but tragic.
🔧 Mohammad Abbas: 128 Test wickets, a welder who lost eyesight working without protective glasses to get here — and a dressing-down from a media manager at Lord's for his trouble
🌀 Ali Usman, the first visiting spinner to take a five-for at Headingley since 1972, now on a plane home
😊 Azan Awais, beaten fourteen times by Jofra, walking off grinning. The good bit nobody will remember.
🎙️ And the biggest story of the week: Usman has a new mic. A state-of-the-art, AI-driven, analytical mic. Please leave a comment about the mic. He needs this.
Osman Samiuddin has covered Pakistan cricket for the better part of three decades and wrote The Unquiet Ones. Ahmer Naqvi has been writing about it long enough to have built a bingo card. Between them they've seen 2009-10 Australia, they've seen Ijaz Butt, they've seen inquiry committees leak reports about toilets. They've still never seen anything like this.
Batta Fast is ESPNcricinfo's weekly Pakistan cricket podcast — half analysis, half gham hour, entirely in whatever language the sentence needs.
