In the moments after the first Test ended on Friday, in the warm – verging on searing, given the conditions – glow of a remarkable victory over Pakistan, Ollie Pope was asked where it ranked among the games he has been involved in over the past couple of years.
Considering the mind-spinning absurdity of the match that had just finished, and the amount of history made over the previous five days – shattering the nation’s 67-year-old record for highest partnership, becoming the first team to concede 500 runs and win by an innings, posting England’s highest score since 1938 and the highest ever compiled in Pakistan, England’s greatest individual innings since 1990, plus Joe Root becoming their leading Test run-scorer of all time, not bad for a few days’ work – his response was surprising: “It would be right up there,” he said. “Definitely top three.”
England have now played 30 Tests since Brendon McCullum’s appointment as coach in May 2022. There is no better illustration of the team’s transformation than that when he turned up they were at a no ebb rather than simply a low one, and now are in a place where a week of ludicrous overachievement and general wonder is merely “right up there”.
Curiously they have done this without significantly improving one basic statistic: England had lost 13 of their previous 30 Tests when the New Zealander took over, and they have lost nine of the 30 since, very much in the same ballpark. Meanwhile they have all but extinguished the least entertaining of outcomes, dropping their draws from 23% to 3% and shifting all of those results to the win column, going from 10 victories in one set of 30 games to 20 in the next. In the end the only reason there is any confusion about which is their greatest recent win is that there are so many to choose from.
Pope was happy to help with the process of elimination. “I can think of Islamabad, Hyderabad and Trent Bridge,” he said. “Probably those are ones that we really look back on, and this is right up with the rest of them.”
Nottingham in 2022 was a Test that exploded at the last, in front of a crowd already giddy after grabbing free tickets for the final day. This was a legend written in about 20 minutes: New Zealand’s Daryl Mitchell and Tom Blundell shared a stand of 236, Ollie Pope and Joe Root scored big hundreds, but the game is remembered because of what happened in the final session.
England needed 160 to win with six wickets in hand, a proposition that appeared to straddle the borderline of achievability. But Jonny Bairstow and Ben Stokes scored 59 off the next four overs, and from there it was a formality. The game was the high-watermark of early Bazball and probably also of Bairstow’s Test career – that this is up for debate is only because for a few months that summer he appeared to forget that he was actually human – but it was basically a sugar rush.
There are no humdrum away wins in India – across the past decade they average two-fifths of a home defeat a year – and perhaps Hyderabad in January 2024 stands alone on this list simply because of the standard of opposition and unfamiliarity of conditions (the current Pakistan team, by contrast, is a complete basket case).
History was made here too: India had never before surrendered a three-figure first-innings lead, and this time they flubbed 190. In the second innings Pope made those 190 back on his own (with six to spare) and then Tom Hartley, mercilessly slogged in the first innings but bravely backed by Stokes, took the most improbable of seven-fers.
Islamabad – the game was actually played in nearby Rawalpindi, but we’ll let that pass – in 2022 was the most obvious comparison to the latest win: the same host nation and a similarly drab pitch, the kind that produces either greatness or tedium and most frequently the latter.
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England worked this out quickly and went with option one. They won the toss, scored 921 across two innings at 6.73 an over and declared on day four giving their hosts four full sessions to chase 343. Those tactics and only those tactics could have won the game, which England did in the final minutes of daylight on day five, a triumph of imaginative captaincy and team spirit.
This week’s game feels like the one, if only for the sheer absurdity of the numbers involved, that will be discussed by future generations. Ultimately this team might be judged by long-term achievements rather than one-off wins, however epic, but there is no shame in mastering those.
The fact is that the only world in which a match as unforgettable as this Test in Multan does not stand alone, obviously and reflexively, is a world full of sporting wonder, high merriment and the best kind of chaos. Remarkably, this is the world that England have come to inhabit.
