ENG vs PAK, 3rd Test — Day 4 Result: England won by 8 wickets, sweep the series 3-0

There is a particular cruelty in the fourth innings of a dead rubber. Pakistan had spent Day 3 producing the best cricket of their tour — 397 runs in a day, Shan Masood five short of a hundred, Razaullah hitting nine sixes from number nine — and all of it was worth exactly 130 runs of defending. That is what a first-innings 133 does to you. It does not just lose you a session; it eats the whole match in advance and leaves you rearranging the furniture in a house that has already been sold.

And yet, for four overs on Saturday morning, they made Edgbaston hold its breath. Mohammad Abbas — 36 years old, still running in off the same unhurried approach, still landing the ball on the same coin — had Ben Duckett caught behind off the first ball he faced and trapped Emilio Gay in front three overs later. England were two for two. One hundred and twenty-eight still required. The scoreboard, for the first time in three Tests, had a sentence on it that Pakistan could read out loud.

Then Joe Root walked out, and the sentence was quietly taken away from them.

Root and Jordan Cox batted for 143 deliveries together and were never once in trouble. That is the honest summary. They added 128 unbroken, Root finishing on 62 from 69 with eight fours, Cox on 59 from 76 with eight of his own, and the partnership had the texture of two men doing a chore properly rather than two men surviving anything.

What made it look easy was that neither of them tried to make it look easy. There was no reverse-ramp, no statement six, none of the theatre that this England side spent three years insisting was the point. Root played the ball late and square. Cox — who had kept wicket through Pakistan's 449 after Jamie Smith's injury, taking four catches and a stumping in the process, and who might reasonably have felt he had done enough for one Test — got forward and drove straight. Twenty-four overs and two balls. Five runs an over without ever appearing to hurry.

Cox's 59 deserves its own line. He came into this series as a wicketkeeping understudy and leaves it having kept through a 449 and made an unbeaten fifty to win a Test. There are careers that turn on a week like that.

Mohammad Abbas finished this series as its joint outstanding cricketer and his team lost every match. Both of those facts are true and the second one is not his fault. His 8-1-27-2 on the final morning was the last piece of a tour in which he bowled with a control that nobody else on either side approached — and he also, at Edgbaston, made 42 from 67 and put on 121 for the ninth wicket with Razaullah, which tells you something unflattering about the seven batters above him.

That is the shape of Pakistan's problem, and it is not a bowling problem. Across six innings this series their top order kept handing the ball back. Here, in the first innings, they were 133 all out in 33.5 overs — a session and a bit. In the second they made 449 and still lost by eight wickets, because a 320-run first-innings deficit is not a hole you climb out of, it is a hole you decorate.

The second-innings runs were real and should not be waved away. Masood's 95 was his most composed innings of the summer. Babar Azam's 76 was his highest score of the series and had passages of the old fluency. Azan Awais, 21 years old, made 59 at the top and looked like a Test opener. Razaullah, on debut, hit nine sixes. But the pattern of this Pakistan side is that the good cricket arrives after the match is decided, and the selectors will have to work out whether that is a technical failing or a temperamental one. It is usually the second.

Edgbaston gave the seamers a first-day surface and then flattened into something genuinely good. The evidence is in the run rates: Pakistan were dismissed for 133 at barely four an over on Day 1 with the ball moving, England made 453 at more than five, Pakistan then made 449 at 4.64, and the fourth innings went at 5.34 with no demons at all. There was no meaningful spin — Dan Lawrence's part-time offbreaks took 2 for 17 and were the only slow bowling that mattered all match.

Our preview suggested the cracks from Day 3 onwards might open the door for Abrar Ahmed or Noman Ali. Pakistan picked neither, and on this evidence they were right not to: the surface never wore. What it did instead was reward anyone willing to bat time, which is precisely why Pakistan's 449 was possible and precisely why it did not matter.

It is a slightly unfashionable award and a completely correct one. Lawrence made 65 from 82 in England's first innings at a moment when 453 was not yet guaranteed — he came in with the innings needing shape and put on 86 with Harry Brook and 64 with Jamie Smith, the two stands that turned a lead into a stranglehold.

Then, on Day 3, with Pakistan 449 and the England seamers out of ideas, he was thrown the ball and took 2 for 17 from 4.4 overs — including the wicket that ended Razaullah's assault, stumped by Cox off a ball that turned just enough. A part-time offspinner closing out an innings of 449 is the kind of detail that gets forgotten within a week. It shouldn't be. It was the passage that stopped Pakistan's lead becoming genuinely awkward.

Sixty-five runs and two wickets is not a colossal match. But Test cricket is frequently decided by the person who does the necessary thing at the moment nobody else can, and twice in four days that was Lawrence.

We previewed this Test leaning towards England for the clean sweep, and that is what happened. We also wrote that Abbas — 900 first-class wickets, spells that belong in a painting — deserved at least one innings where the scoreboard reflected him. He got the Player of the Series award instead, shared with Ollie Robinson, which is either a consolation or an indictment depending on how you feel about Pakistani cricket this summer.

Two misses to own. We flagged the possibility of Abrar Ahmed or Noman Ali exploiting fourth-innings cracks; Pakistan picked no frontline spinner and the pitch never gave them a reason to regret it. And we framed the contest around England's seam attack of Robinson, Tongue and Archer — which took 3 for 15, 4 for 42 and 3 for 25 in the first innings and then conceded 280 runs between them in the second. Pakistan's Day 3 was as much a failure of England's bowling plans as a triumph of Pakistan's batting, and we did not see it coming.

England finish a chaotic summer — Ben Stokes retired, Brendon McCullum gone, Joe Root recalled to the captaincy mid-stream — with three wins from three and a settled-looking attack. Robinson's series was outstanding. Emilio Gay and Jordan Cox both leave with runs and a case. Jamie Smith's injury is the one open question, because Cox has just demonstrated that the gloves are not a vacancy anyone needs to worry about filling.

Pakistan go home to a review that will be louder than the cricket deserved. Somewhere in the wreckage there are three genuinely encouraging things: Azan Awais at 21, Razaullah's debut, and a 36-year-old seamer who has now spent a decade being the best thing about teams that lose. Whether the system around them can turn those into a side is the same question Pakistani cricket has been asking itself for most of the last ten years. Abbas will not be there for the answer forever.