'Poor Side' to '250 From Babar': Broad Can't Decide If Pakistan Are Terrible or Dangerous

Stuart Broad has never been accused of excessive diplomacy. But even by his standards, the pre-series assessment of Pakistan on the For The Love Of Cricket podcast with Jos Buttler was scorching.

"They're a poor side. They're not really a good side," Broad said, before delivering the full verdict: "You would imagine and you would think that England should win 3-0 and pretty comfortably."

Not a hedged prediction. Not a 'they'll be competitive but England have the edge.' A flat declaration that Pakistan — a team with 23 Test wins against England, a squad featuring Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi, and Naseem Shah — are simply poor. Full stop.

The comment was made before the first Test at Headingley. It was designed to provoke. It did.

Then Pakistan went to Leeds and got obliterated. An innings and 103 runs. Three days. Pakistan managed 171 and 135 — combined totals that wouldn't make a competitive first innings in most club matches. Ollie Robinson ripped through them with 5/51 and 3/29. Josh Tongue joined the demolition. England's 409 looked like a declaration on a different planet.

Broad, naturally, stood firm. In a follow-up, he doubled down on his "very poor side" assessment, making it clear that Headingley hadn't changed his mind — it had confirmed it.

And on the surface, the scoreboard backs him. Pakistan's batting was porous, their bowling lacked teeth, and their fielding — as stand-in captain Salman Ali Agha admitted — lacked basic concentration.

Here's where Broad's narrative goes off the rails. In the same breath as calling Pakistan poor, in the same podcast series, Broad pivoted to previewing the Lord's Test — and suddenly Pakistan weren't so poor anymore.

"Babar Azam could get 250," Broad told Buttler. "When you've got those sort of players in there... that's what they'll have to hope for."

Hold on. A 'very poor side' contains a batsman who could score 250 at Lord's? That's not a poor side — that's a side with a generational talent surrounded by question marks. There's a universe of difference between the two, and Broad just casually strolled across it without acknowledging the contradiction.

Because here's the thing about Babar Azam: 62 Tests, 4,481 runs, a Test average of 42.68, 9 centuries, and a career-best 196 in the fourth innings against Australia — the second-longest knock in fourth-innings history at 425 deliveries. A man who once held top-three rankings simultaneously across formats. You don't call a team 'poor' and then say their number one can produce a double-century in the same sentence. Not with a straight face.

If Broad thought his comments would go unchallenged, he was mistaken. Former Pakistan opener Salman Butt — never one to let a slight go unanswered — went straight for the jugular.

"Stuart Broad was saying that Pakistan is a poor side. Okay, Pakistan isn't playing good cricket at the moment, but what is this 'poor team' comment?" Butt fired back on his YouTube channel. "You have a very good team, so what happens to you when you go to Australia? You lose 5-0 every time."

It's a fair point. England's Ashes record is a graveyard of ambition. But Butt didn't stop there. He accused Broad of a "superiority complex" and pointed out that Pakistan's squad is entirely homegrown — no naturalised imports, no dual-passport recruits — unlike some other teams he could name.

Whether that's a compelling cricketing argument or a nationalist deflection, it resonated. The clip went viral across Pakistani cricket media.

The deepest irony in Broad's prediction is England's own form. This is not the England of 2022-23, the Bazball juggernaut that chased down 378 in Rawalpindi and won 3-0 in Pakistan. This is post-Bazball England — the era after Ben Stokes retired and Brendon McCullum moved to white-ball duties.

England have lost seven of their last nine Tests. They haven't won a series since December 2024. The only other time England suffered seven defeats in nine Tests in the last 30 years was between 2013 and 2014. Joe Root's return as captain has steadied the dressing room, but the results haven't followed — until Headingley.

So when Broad says 'England should win 3-0 pretty comfortably,' he's talking about a team that's been anything but comfortable for 18 months. One dominant home Test against an injury-depleted Pakistan without Babar Azam doesn't erase a trend. It's a data point, not a reversal.

Meanwhile, inside the Pakistan camp, the mood after Headingley was a cocktail of contrition and dark humour. Stand-in captain Salman Ali Agha — thrust into the role after Babar's hand injury — didn't sugarcoat the performance.

"Bowling, batting and fielding — England outplayed us," Agha said in the post-match presser. "We were not consistent enough in any department. In England, consistency is important because there is lateral movement here, so you must be focused at all times. That was missing."

Then came the line that captured Pakistan cricket's perpetual tragicomedy. Asked about the captaincy for the Lord's Test with Babar expected to return: "I will be more than happy to hand over the captaincy to him."

It was delivered with a smile, but the subtext was unmistakable: please take this poisoned chalice off my hands. Pakistan's captaincy carousel continues to spin — Babar has had the armband, given it up, been given it back, had it taken away, and is now set to reclaim it yet again. The only consistent thing about Pakistan's leadership is its inconsistency.

The second Test begins on Wednesday at the Home of Cricket, and if Broad's contradictory assessment tells us anything, it's that nobody quite knows what to expect.

Lord's pitches have trended seamer-friendly in recent years, which should favour England's pace battery of Robinson and Tongue — fresh off their combined 16-wicket demolition at Headingley. But Pakistan's own seam resources aren't negligible: Mohammad Abbas brings 300+ County Championship wickets and intimate knowledge of English conditions.

The real variable is Babar. If he walks out at Lord's and makes the kind of innings Broad half-predicted — a 200-plus epic that bends the match to his will — then the 'poor side' label dies on the pitch. If he falls cheaply, Broad gets to be right twice.

But there's a third possibility nobody's talking about: England's fragile confidence cracks under the Lord's spotlight, Pakistan's bowlers find their lengths on a helpful surface, and the pre-series predictions look as unreliable as England's away record. At 7 losses in 9, England's margin for error is thinner than they'd like to admit.

Broad is right that this Pakistan side is deeply flawed. A batting order that can only produce 171 and 135 on a decent Headingley surface — without their best batter — has structural problems that go beyond one injury absence. But calling them 'poor' while your own team has lost seven of nine Tests is the definition of throwing stones from a glass house.

Butt is right that English pundits have a blind spot for their own team's failures. But deflecting to the Ashes when your team just lost inside three days doesn't address the specific deficiencies that caused this defeat.

And Agha is right that Pakistan needs Babar back. But if the return of one player is the difference between a 'poor side' and a competitive one, that's not a rebuttal of Broad's argument — it's a confirmation of it.

Lord's will sort it out. It usually does.