WI vs PAK, 2nd Test — Day 3 Stumps: West Indies 103/6, Lead by 60 After Shafique's 160* and Sajid Khan's Four-For Turn the Match Twice

Three days into this Test match, 74.5 overs of it were bowled on Tuesday and both sides were, at various points, comfortably winning. That is the highest compliment you can pay a day of Test cricket. Pakistan began it 266 for 2 and 78 behind, with Abdullah Shafique on a hundred and Babar Azam on 86, and looked set for a lead of 150. They ended their innings with a lead of 43. West Indies then had eleven overs before tea and thirty after it to establish a position of safety and instead lost six wickets for 103. At stumps they are 60 ahead with four in hand, on a pitch where the fourth innings averages 167.

Nobody is winning this Test comfortably now. Which, given that West Indies only need a draw to take the series and Pakistan have lost eight consecutive away Tests, is a considerably better situation than the one Pakistan woke up to a week ago.

Abdullah Shafique's innings is the thing that will be remembered from this Test regardless of how it ends. He faced 323 balls. He batted across three days. He was there when Pakistan were 33 for 1 and he was there, unbeaten on 160, when the tenth wicket fell and the innings was over — his partners in the last eight wickets contributing 59 runs between them while he watched from twenty-two yards away. For a batter who has spent two years being told he cannot convert, and for a top order that has produced 282, 120 and not much else on this tour, it was an answer to a question that had started to sound like an accusation.

What made it a Test innings rather than a large score is the tempo. Shafique scored at under 50 per hundred balls. On a surface that has offered turn since the first session, in a match his side must win, he did the least fashionable thing available to him: he refused to be the one who got out. Babar Azam gave him 147 balls of company and 88 runs of it, and their stand was the reason Pakistan got a lead at all. That Babar was run out by Brandon King two short of what would have been a significant hundred is the sort of detail that will be replayed all week in Karachi. It is also, if you are being fair about it, the moment Pakistan lost control of the innings.

Because after Babar went, Pakistan lost 8 for 121 — and six of those wickets went to a 33-year-old left-arm spinner who has spent most of his career being the bowler West Indies pick when they cannot find anyone better. Jomel Warrican bowled 46 overs. Forty-six. He finished with 6 for 112, and he took Azan Awais, Awais Zafar, Rizwan, Ali Usman, Ubaid Shah and Mohammad Ali — the top of the order and then the entire tail, which is precisely the shape of a spell that turns a deficit into a manageable one. Shamar Joseph's 2 for 84 was expensive and important; Jayden Seales's 19 overs for 55 was neither expensive nor rewarded. But this was Warrican's day for as long as West Indies were batting second, and 46 overs in Port of Spain heat is a physical act as much as a technical one.

And then the game turned again, faster than either side can have expected. West Indies needed to bat out the evening and did not come close. Sajid Khan took 4 for 32 from twelve overs — Chanderpaul lbw, Jangoo bowled, Hope lbw, and Jayden Seales lbw second ball as a nightwatchman whose watch lasted two deliveries. Ali Usman, whose 35 overs in the first innings had gone for 80, added Kavem Hodge and then Roston Chase caught and bowled, and West Indies went from steady to six down in the space of an evening session. In the last ten overs of the day they scored eight runs.

The two numbers that matter from that passage: Pakistan's two spinners bowled 28.5 of the 40.5 overs and took all six wickets, and four of those six were lbw or bowled. On a fifth-day pitch at a ground where fourth innings average 167, a lead of 60 with four wickets left is not a position of safety. It is not a disaster either — Greaves is unbeaten, Brandon King has not yet batted, and 150 would still be an awkward target here. But the margin has gone.

A note on the surface, because it has now behaved the same way for three consecutive days and that is no longer a coincidence. Queen's Park Oval is supposed to seam early and bring the spinners in around day three. Instead spin has bowled the majority of the overs from the first session onward, and the numbers are stark: across both innings so far Sajid Khan and Ali Usman have bowled 96.3 overs for 226 runs and 12 wickets, and Warrican bowled 46 in one innings. The quicks on both sides have been used in short bursts and have taken their wickets, but neither attack has built pressure with the new ball the way the pre-match reading suggested they would.

Which brings us back, unavoidably, to Mohammad Abbas. Pakistan left out the bowler who had taken eight wickets in the first Test and broken Imran Khan's all-time bowling average record, and Babar explained it as being down to conditions. Three days in, it is very hard to argue the conditions have made him wrong. Sajid Khan and Ali Usman have 12 of Pakistan's 16 wickets. If Pakistan win this Test, that selection will be remembered as the call that did it.

CricIntel prediction review. Our preview built its case on three things, and Day 3 has now graded all of them. We said the whole match would come down to whether Pakistan's middle order could bat time — that after 282 and 120 in the first Test they could not afford to leave themselves anything to chase. Shafique batted 323 balls and Pakistan took a first-innings lead, so: called. We also wrote that the most likely shape of a Pakistan win was Babar batting a long way into the second day with someone staying with him for a session and a half; Babar made 88 across the second and third days and the partnership with Shafique was the innings. Where we were wrong we have already said so in the Day 1 report and will say again: we built the preview around Mohammad Abbas, who has not bowled a ball in this Test, and around a venue whose seam movement we called front-loaded on a pitch that has been a spinner's from the opening hour. We should also concede that we did not mention Jomel Warrican once, and he has 6 for 112.

How Day 4 sets up. Everything now runs through the first hour. West Indies resume 103 for 6, 60 ahead, with Justin Greaves — who has made a habit on this tour of walking into a mess and standing in it — on 1 not out, and Brandon King, Kemar Roach and Warrican to come. If they get to a lead of 150, Pakistan are chasing on a fourth-day Port of Spain surface against Warrican, and 150 there is worth 220 anywhere else. If Sajid Khan takes two quick ones in the morning and the lead stays under 110, Pakistan will fancy it with Shafique in the form of his life and two days to get them. West Indies need a draw to win the series; Pakistan need a win to save it and to end a run of eight straight away defeats. There is no version of Day 4 in which anybody is allowed to be comfortable.