ENG vs PAK, 2nd Test — Day 2 Stumps: England 290 & 81/3, Lead by 261 as Robinson Takes 4-11

For a day and a half at Lord's, Pakistan bowled as well as any visiting attack has bowled in England this summer. Mohammad Abbas found the seam position he has been finding for fifteen years, Mohammad Ali bowled twenty-two overs of hard length, and England — a side that does not know how to bat slowly — were reduced to 36 for 3, then 120 for 5, then 222 for 8. It was, by any reasonable measure, a winning position.

Then Pakistan had to bat, and the whole thing came apart in thirty-seven overs. Bowling is a skill you can rehearse; batting on the second afternoon at Lord's with the ball moving both ways is a nerve you either have or do not. Pakistan made 110. Twenty of those runs were extras. Forty-six were Azan Awais. The other nine batters, between them, contributed forty-four.

Start with the forty-seven runs that England should not have had. They resumed on 248 for 9 with Gus Atkinson 34 not out and Josh Tongue 1, and the last pair batted for another eleven overs. Tongue — a No. 11 by trade and by temperament — faced 48 balls for an unbeaten 30, hit four fours, survived a Pakistan review in the fifty-eighth over, and refused to give it away. Atkinson made 45 from 46 before Ali Usman finally had him caught at 290. The tenth wicket was worth 47.

Hold that number against the rest of the day. England's lead after the first innings was 180. Without the last pair it would have been 138, and Pakistan — 110 all out either way — would still have been in a Test match, forty runs closer, with the second-innings deficit inside a session's batting rather than beyond it. Tail-end runs are the least glamorous currency in the game and they are almost always the ones that decide Tests at this ground.

What Ollie Robinson did after lunch does not really belong in a scorebook. Thirteen overs. Six maidens. Eleven runs. Four wickets. An economy rate of 0.84 in a Test innings in 2026, in a match where the other three England seamers went at better than two an over and the batting side's own extras column outscored eight of its ten batters. He bowled a fraction fuller than everyone expected, used the slope from the Pavilion End as though he had been given a diagram of it, and made not-scoring the only option available.

He removed Saud Shakeel lbw for 16 — England reviewed, England won it — and Mohammad Rizwan lbw for 7 the same way after the rain break. He had Khurram Shahzad caught at slip. And he ended the innings' one act of resistance when Azan Awais, on 46 from 102 balls, edged to Emilio Gay at 106 for 8. Jofra Archer took the top and the tail — Shan Masood caught behind for 1 in the fourth over, then Ali Usman and Abbas bowled — for 3 for 26. Josh Tongue, who had already made 30 with the bat, added Abdullah Shafique and Babar Azam for 2 for 27. Pakistan lost their last five wickets for nineteen runs in nine overs.

Azan Awais deserves better than a footnote. He is 22, he batted for two hours and forty-two minutes, he faced 102 of the 224 balls Pakistan received, and he survived two DRS decisions — one England review struck down in the third over, one of his own upheld in the twenty-eighth. He watched Babar Azam come and go for 8, watched Rizwan pinned, watched the rain arrive at 81 for 4 and the innings fold within nine overs of the restart. Nobody stayed with him. His 46 was 42 per cent of his team's total, and the twelve byes were the second-highest scorer.

Pakistan were also a batter short. Imam-ul-Haq was listed absent hurt and did not come to the middle, so the innings ended on nine wickets down — a detail that flatters the scorecard rather than the batting, because 110 for 9 in this context is not meaningfully different from 110 all out.

The Lord's surface, watched all summer since the ICC rated it unsatisfactory in June, is doing what a good English second-day pitch does rather than what a bad one does. Twelve wickets fell on Friday and all twelve went to seam, but the mode of dismissal is instructive: three lbws, four bowled, four caught behind the wicket or at slip. That is a pitch offering movement to a full length, not one exploding from a crack. The proof is on both scorecards — Tongue survived 48 balls at No. 11 and Awais 102 at No. 2, while batters who played from the crease at anything full went in a hurry.

England's second innings, in the last session, was the third distinct phase of the day. Khurram Shahzad — expensive on Thursday, 79 from 15 — found his rhythm with the fresh ball and had Ben Duckett caught by Babar for 1 in the second over and Jordan Cox lbw for 11 in the fourth. Joe Root and Emilio Gay then added 47 for the third wicket before Mohammad Ali trapped Root for 24. Gay, who made 8 in the first innings, was still there at the close on 30 from 69 balls, with Harry Brook 7 alongside him. Bad light ended the day for the second evening running, England 81 for 3.

The arithmetic on Saturday morning is simple and heavily one-sided. England lead by 261 with seven wickets standing and three days remaining. Anything approaching 350 makes this a formality; even 300 asks Pakistan to make the highest fourth-innings score at Lord's in the modern era on a surface that has given twenty-one wickets to seam in two days. Pakistan's only genuine route back is to bowl England out cheaply on Saturday morning and then bat, for the first time in this match, the way Azan Awais batted.

The bleak part, for a touring side that has bowled with real quality across both Tests, is that the bowling has never been the problem. Abbas has 4 for 73 here after taking wickets at Headingley; Ali has bowled forty-plus overs of discipline; Khurram found two in the evening. Pakistan have taken thirteen England wickets in this Test and are 261 behind. That is a batting problem, and it does not get solved between now and Saturday.

Our Day 1 note said neither side could be confident whether 248 was a poor total or a decent one, and flagged the tenth wicket as the passage worth watching — that Atkinson at 34 not out had already been the difference between 210 and 248, and that Pakistan wanted the new ball nowhere near his hitting arc. He made another eleven, Tongue made another 29, and the pair added 42 on the second morning. We also wrote after Headingley that Ollie Robinson's five-for there was the sort of spell that goes unnoticed next to faster men; four for eleven at Lord's should settle that. What we have got wrong twice now is Pakistan's batting — we keep framing Babar Azam's return as the variable that decides their innings, and across three completed innings in this series the variable has been everyone else.