ENG vs PAK, 2nd Test — Day 3 Stumps: England 290 & 177/7, Lead by 357 as Rain and Mohammad Abbas Share the Day

There is a particular flavour of frustration reserved for a team that has bowled well enough to be in a Test match and keeps looking up at a sky that will not let them finish the job. Pakistan spent Saturday at Lord's taking four England wickets in twenty-four overs and five balls — a rate of one every six overs, on a pitch that has now surrendered twenty-five wickets in three days — and ended it 357 behind with two days to bat. The bowling has never been the issue on this tour. The weather has only made the arithmetic of the batting louder.

Nothing happened before lunch. The umpires inspected, the rain returned, the covers came on and off, and the players took the interval at exactly where they had left it on Friday evening: 81 for 3, Emilio Gay 30, Harry Brook 7. When play finally began, Gay lasted five more balls for one more run and Mohammad Abbas had him lbw. That is Test cricket's cruellest small print — three-quarters of a session of waiting, and the man who had done the waiting best all series was gone within an over of the resumption.

Mohammad Abbas is 36 years old, took his 900th first-class wicket earlier this summer, and has now bowled 38 overs in this Test for 121 runs and seven wickets. On Saturday he had Gay lbw, drew the edge from Harry Brook through to Mohammad Rizwan, and had Jamie Smith caught at slip by Shan Masood — three of the four to fall, all of them to the same method he has used for a decade: full, seam upright, angled in and then not coming in, bowled at a pace slow enough that batters keep believing they have time.

Eighteen overs, two maidens, 48 runs. Against a side that scores at four an over as a matter of doctrine, he went at 2.66. In a Test where England have made 290 and 177 for 7 and lead by 357, Abbas's figures read like a report from a different match — one Pakistan are winning. That gap between what a bowler earns and what his team collects is the oldest injustice in the game, and Abbas has lived inside it for most of his career.

Mohammad Ali supported him with 2 for 54 from 12.5, having Joe Root lbw for 24 and Gus Atkinson lbw for 7, and Khurram Shahzad took the two early wickets on Friday evening that gave the innings its shape. Pakistan have now taken seventeen England wickets in this Test. Seventeen wickets and a 357-run deficit is not a bowling problem.

England's best hour belonged to Dan Lawrence, who was run out for 17 in the first innings and has spent a good deal of this series being the batter whose place people discuss. He came in at 83 for 4 with the ball moving and the light poor, and he played the only innings of the day that had any width to it: 50 not out from 66 balls with six fours and two sixes, reaching the mark off 64 deliveries between the third and fourth rain breaks.

The two sixes matter more than the fours. On a surface where every England batter who has played from the crease has been dismissed playing from the crease, Lawrence's answer was to get down the pitch and take the length away from the bowler — the same instinct that has made him hard to select and, when it comes off, hard to bowl at. He put on 45 with Brook for the fifth wicket and then watched Smith and Atkinson depart in the space of five overs either side of tea, and he was still there at the close with Ollie Robinson for company on 2.

Harry Brook's 34 from 56 was his most disciplined innings of the series and still ended the way all of them have — a good ball, an outside edge, Rizwan's gloves. Between them, Brook and Gay batted for two and a half hours on Saturday for 58 runs. That is not how England have talked about batting for four years. It is, on this pitch and in this light, exactly how the match needed to be batted.

Four separate stoppages are recorded on Saturday's ball-by-ball: rain and a wet ground before lunch, again at 99 for 4 in the thirtieth over, again at 162 for 6 which became tea, and finally at 177 for 7 which became the end of the day. Two hours and twenty-five minutes of cricket out of a scheduled six. Lord's has now lost time on all three days of this Test.

The surface itself continues to reward good bowling without misbehaving. Three of Saturday's four dismissals were lbw or caught behind off a full length; nobody was hit, nothing spat. This is a pitch that punishes batters who commit early and rewards those who play late, which is why Lawrence's decision to move his feet rather than his hands has been the most productive plan anyone has found in six innings across two Tests.

England lead by 357 with three wickets standing. Realistically they will bat for an hour on Sunday morning, push the lead somewhere past 380, and then have two days minus that hour to take ten Pakistan wickets — nine, in effect, with Imam-ul-Haq absent hurt from the first innings and his availability the one genuinely unknown variable in this match.

Pakistan's fourth-innings target will be beyond anything ever chased at Lord's. So the honest question is not whether they can win but whether they can bat five sessions, and the honest answer on the evidence of 110 all out is that only Azan Awais has shown he can bat one. The rain is now Pakistan's most reliable ally, and there is more forecast. A Test that England should close out in a session and a half may yet need the weather's permission to end at all.

Our Day 2 note said the arithmetic was simple and heavily one-sided, that anything approaching 350 made this a formality, and that Pakistan's only route back was to bowl England out cheaply on Saturday morning and then bat properly for the first time in the match. Half of that came off: they did bowl England's middle order out reasonably cheaply, taking four for 96, and Abbas in particular bowled as well as anyone has in this series. The other half never got the chance, because there was no Saturday morning to speak of. We also wrote that Pakistan's problem was a batting problem that would not be solved overnight — nothing on Saturday tested that, and everything about Sunday will.