'Used to Chaos' — Hesson Admits Pakistan Don't Even Know What Their Test Team Is

Mike Hesson's week was supposed to go like this: fly from Japan, where he'd been preparing Pakistan's white-ball squad for the Asian Games, to England for a royal audience at Clarence House. Shake hands with King Charles. Enjoy a nice occasion. Fly back to planning T20Is.

Instead, the Pakistan Cricket Board sacked head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul, dropped seven players from the Test squad, and told their white-ball coach — who has never been involved in Pakistan's red-ball cricket, ever — to take charge of the third Test at Edgbaston. "I was heading over to see the King and be part of a nice occasion," Hesson told reporters at Edgbaston. "That got expedited."

Expedited is one word for it. Another would be: ambushed.

Hesson made one thing emphatically clear at his press conference: he did not select this team. "When this side was selected for this tour, I had no involvement at all," he said. "I'm not part of the red-ball selection panel. I'm part of the white-ball selection panel." He repeated variations of this three separate times. The subtext was screaming.

Consider the absurdity. Hesson is coaching a Test match for a team whose players were chosen by someone else, whose previous coaches were fired by someone else, and whose entire strategic direction was set by institutional panic rather than cricketing logic. He didn't pick the squad. He didn't sack the coaches. He didn't send seven players home. He just got told to show up and make it work.

"When I took over, there were three players who had already left the squad: Rizwan, Imam and Salman Ali Agha," Hesson said, describing a scene where players were arriving and departing simultaneously. The last couple of days, he admitted, had been "challenging."

The most revealing moment of Hesson's press conference wasn't the "chaos" line. It was his quiet admission about what Pakistan's Test team is supposed to be.

"Pakistan is known for the pace, unusual actions, mystery spin," he said. "We haven't really been able to present any of that." Read that again. Pakistan's own interim coach is saying that the defining characteristics of Pakistan Test cricket — the things that made them dangerous, unpredictable, thrilling — have been absent from this team. The identity is gone.

He wasn't wrong. At Headingley and Lord's, Pakistan's bowling was honest, industrious, and utterly unthreatening to an England side that has spent the summer smashing anyone who doesn't offer something different. Mohammad Abbas was the exception — 10 wickets at 20.80, the only Pakistani who looked like he belonged.

"We need a little bit of an x-factor in there as well to try and create some opportunities to support Mohammed Abbas, who's done incredibly well," Hesson said. Translation: Abbas is carrying this bowling attack on his own and we need someone, anyone, to give him backup.

Hesson wasn't the only coach blindsided. Bowling coach Ashley Noffke — a former Queensland and Australia fast bowler — was in bed when his phone buzzed at 3am with a message telling him he was being sent to England. Like Hesson, Noffke is Pakistan's white-ball bowling coach. Red-ball cricket was never his department.

And yet there he was at Edgbaston, telling reporters that Pakistan are at the "very start" of the rebuilding process. The very start. Two Tests into a series they've already lost. With a squad they didn't pick. In conditions they can't change. At the very start.

This is the state of Pakistan Test cricket in September 2026: two white-ball coaches who got 3am messages and last-minute flights are now responsible for restoring the identity of a team that conquered England, India, and Australia under men like Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, and Waqar Younis. Good luck.

Perhaps the most surreal detail of this whole saga was the Clarence House audience. The Pakistan squad had been invited to meet King Charles on September 2nd — a prestigious engagement that the PCB couldn't afford to look embarrassing. The problem? They'd just dropped seven players.

According to The Daily Telegraph, the PCB asked the axed players still in England to attend anyway, fearing that a depleted turnout would "embarrass" the board at "such a high-profile engagement." Four of the dropped players — Ali Usman, Aamir Jamal, Khurram Shahzad, and Muhammad Awais Zafar — agreed. One refused.

Imagine being dropped from a Test team and then being asked to dress up and smile at a royal reception as if nothing happened. Imagine being told your cricket isn't good enough for Edgbaston but please shake the King's hand so the PCB doesn't look thin on numbers. Rizwan and Imam had already flown home. The one who stayed and refused — whose identity hasn't been confirmed — made the most honest statement of the entire tour by simply not showing up.

What makes Hesson's press conference so striking is that it was honest. In a cricket system where Misbah-ul-Haq got a show-cause notice for speaking the truth, where coaches get sacked after five Tests, and where selectors find out about selections on social media, Hesson walked into the press room and said, plainly: I didn't pick this team. I've never coached red-ball cricket for Pakistan. The players are used to chaos. We've lost our identity.

He said all of that — and he's still employed. Perhaps because he's foreign, and as Misbah pointed out last week, "we tend to have a soft corner for foreign coaches." Or perhaps because when a system is this dysfunctional, the only people who can tell the truth are the ones with a flight home already booked.

The Edgbaston Test starts Wednesday. England will chase a 3-0 whitewash. Pakistan will field a team assembled by committee panic, coached by a man who was supposed to be watching T20s in Tokyo, and featuring five players who have never worn the baggy green — sorry, the star and crescent — in a Test match. If Hesson's honesty is anything to go by, Pakistan know exactly what they are right now: a team at the very start of something, just not entirely sure what.