ENG vs PAK, 3rd Test — Day 3 Stumps: Pakistan 133 & 449, lead by 129

Pakistan came to Edgbaston on Friday morning 268 runs behind, two wickets down, two Tests down, and — if you had been listening to the noise around this series — several rungs below the level required to be here at all. They had been bowled out for 133 on the first day in 33.5 overs. They had watched England's last four batters make more runs than their entire first innings. They had lost the series at Lord's and the argument long before that.

They batted for 84 overs and scored 397 runs, and when Razaullah was stumped at 449 in the final session, Pakistan had turned a 268-run deficit into a 129-run lead. It is the kind of day that does not change a scoreline — England still lead the series 2-0, and there is nothing at Edgbaston Pakistan can do about that — but it changes the thing underneath the scoreline, which is whether a team believes it belongs. For one day, and for the first time this summer, the answer was not in doubt.

The most valuable thing Azan Awais and Shan Masood did in the first session was make the cricket look uneventful. There was no counter-attack, no statement, nothing that would make a highlights package. There was a third-wicket partnership that reached 100 from 149 balls and finished at 125, and a scoreboard that ticked past fifty, then a hundred, then a hundred and fifty, without England ever quite finding the ball that had been finding Pakistan's edge all series.

Awais reached his fifty from 78 balls with nine fours, and was finally given out on review off Dan Lawrence — the part-time off-spinner, the seventh option, brought on because the front-line four had not worked. He had made 59 from 84. Masood reached his fifty from 81 and simply carried on: 83 not out at lunch, Pakistan 184 for 3, a session that cost England one wicket and 132 runs.

Babar Azam has spent two years being discussed rather than watched. At Edgbaston he made 76 from 103 balls with eleven fours and a six, added 89 with his captain for the fourth wicket, and looked — for the first extended passage of this tour — like a batter playing the ball rather than the conversation about him.

Masood did not get his hundred. He was on 95 when he edged Gus Atkinson to Dan Lawrence, 148 balls and twelve fours into an innings that had held the whole recovery together, and the walk off was the walk of a man doing arithmetic he would rather not do. Five runs. He will think about them. He should also think about the fact that Pakistan were 26 for 4 in the first innings of this match and 214 for 4 in the second, and that the difference was almost entirely him.

England took two in the session and went to tea with Pakistan 297 for 5 — still 23 behind, the lead not yet real, the day still arguably theirs.

Pakistan lost three wickets for 12 runs after tea. Saud Shakeel went for 29, Ghazi Ghori for 16, Mohammad Imran for 4 from 24 laborious balls, and at 318 for 8 the lead was 2 and the story of the day was going to be a good effort that fell short. England had the new ball coming. The match was, by any normal reading, back where it started.

What followed was not normal. Razaullah — on Test debut, batting at nine, having already taken four wickets in England's innings — reached fifty from 43 balls with five sixes, and did not stop. He finished with 81 from 63, four fours and nine sixes, which means 54 of his runs came without the ball touching the ground. At the other end Mohammad Abbas, a No. 10 with a career built entirely on the other discipline, made 42 from 67 and hit two sixes of his own. Their ninth-wicket stand was worth 121 — the 50 of it from 57 balls, the 100 from 95 — and it took Pakistan from 2 runs ahead to 306 ahead of where they had any right to be.

England's response was to bowl 22 overs of Jofra Archer for 120 and 22 of Josh Tongue for 106. Only Ollie Robinson, 23 overs for 54 with eight maidens, kept his economy where a Test bowler wants it, and he had taken his two wickets in the first over of the innings the evening before. Razaullah was finally stumped off Lawrence, charging, because that is the only way an innings like that ends. Pakistan 449. Lead 129. Two days left.

Two footnotes deserve rescuing from the scorecard. The first is Jordan Cox, who was not supposed to be keeping wicket at all — Jamie Smith injured a finger on Day 2 — and who took four catches and a stumping in a 96-over innings in which Pakistan's batters edged and missed for an entire day. A stand-in keeper who gets through that without a blemish has had a very good day indeed, and nobody will write about him.

The second is the 43 extras. Pakistan's fourth-highest scorer on Friday was England's discipline, or the lack of it: 24 leg-byes and 15 byes on a surface where the ball was deviating enough to beat both bat and keeper. On a day decided by 129 runs, a third of that margin came off nobody's bat.

We should be straightforward about this, because we have been wrong two days running. Our Day 2 report said that the only question left in this Test was “how long can they bat?” and treated a 3-0 sweep as a matter of time. Pakistan's answer was 84 overs, 397 runs and a lead, and our framing looks worse than their batting did.

Our pre-match preview flagged Razaullah as a debutant to watch. He has now taken 4 for 148 and made 81 from 63 with nine sixes, which is more than anyone sensibly predicts of a Test debutant and considerably more than we did. We also assumed England's seam depth would be decisive across five days; on Day 3, Archer and Tongue conceded 226 runs between them for three wickets and the most dangerous bowler England had was their part-time off-spinner. That is a genuine miss, and the sort we would rather own on the day than quietly leave out of tomorrow's report.

England bat again 129 behind, on a pitch now in its fourth day, against an attack that will bowl with a lead for the first time in the series. The obvious caveat is the obvious one: England scored 453 in 89 overs on this surface, and a target of 250 on Day 5 at Edgbaston would not frighten a side that plays at five an over. Pakistan need early wickets in a way they have not needed them all summer.

The specific things to track: whether Robinson can repeat what he has done to the top order in both innings; whether Mohammad Abbas and Mohammad Imran can extract anything from a wearing surface; whether Razaullah's four first-innings wickets were a debutant's day out or a genuine option; and whether Babar Azam's 76 was the start of something or a single good afternoon. Two days remain, the series cannot be saved, and Pakistan have something better than that to play for — the demonstration, on the record, that the two Tests before this one were not the whole truth.