Halfway through the afternoon session, as drinks were taken after the completion of his 10th over, Mohammad Abbas waved at the Pakistan dressing room and beckoned on their physios. When they reached him he gestured at his right buttock and lay on his front while they worked extensively on his glutes and up his back.
Many of his teammates took the opportunity to sit down while England’s batters stood chatting nearby, the drinks break extending by a few bonus minutes to allow for the repairs.
Enough time, it turned out, for minds to drift, focus to break. Abbas rose, dusted himself down and moved into his fielding position at mid-on; Imam-ul-Haq misfielded the next ball to gift Dan Lawrence a couple; Lawrence and Jordan Cox got into a muddle off the next and the former was run out, breaking a handy partnership of 43.
He had taken the first three wickets of the game for himself, but Abbas’s skills are so finely honed he can create opportunities while completely immobile. While prone to taking wickets, here he helped take a wicket while prone.
A few minutes later, by bowling the final ball of his 12th over, Abbas took the number of deliveries he had sent down in first-class games on this ground to 738, one more than Jofra Archer. At least until England have to bowl, of those involved in this game only Ollie Robinson has flung down more red balls at Lord’s than Pakistan’s senior seamer.
Archer later lifted one Abbas delivery down the ground for six and clipped another through square-leg for four. Unlike his breaktime massage Abbas was not going to take that lying down; he quickly found a way past a wildly swinging bat to dismantle the stumps.
He is a visiting bowler playing in what are effectively home conditions: he has bowled more for Hampshire than for any other team and since getting special dispensation to play in England before Pakistan’s Test series in 2018 he has played almost twice as many games in the County Championship (80) as in Pakistan’s domestic first-class competition (41).
His first game at Lord’s was in the 2018 series. “I wanted to get on the honours board, but I came close,” he said afterwards and he could scarcely have come closer, taking four wickets in each innings. “However, if I get the chance to play a Test match in future at Lord’s then that is definitely a target for me.”
He has had to wait. Since first playing at Lord’s in June 1954, Pakistan have averaged a game here every four years and never had as big a gap as the eight years, three months and three days that separated the start of that last game to this one. By the time he had bowled six overs England were three down and he had them all.
Abbas does nothing very quickly, except take wickets. If there was a bit of good fortune to the dismissal of Emilio Gay, superbly caught behind the stumps after tickling one down the leg-side, there was none as Ben Duckett was trapped lbw to become his 900th in first-class cricket, at an average just over 20. Joe Root followed soon after, also lbw, just as he had been the last time Abbas bowled at him on this ground.
There is nothing flamboyant in the 36-year-old’s appearance or in his action, nothing particularly compelling about him except the consistency of his bowling and the statistics that reflect it. Perhaps that is why he has never beguiled Pakistan’s selectors as he has so many opposition batters, and why they have picked him with their customary inconsistency.
Though most of his wicket-taking was by then done, that spell either side of afternoon drinks, delivered despite sundry aches and pains, still illustrated Abbas’s quality. He had been unable to bowl immediately after lunch because of time he spent off the field, but between him coming back on and the end of his spell nine overs brought 14 runs, no boundaries and that run-out. Between then and tea there were seven overs, eight boundaries and 51 runs as Cox and Jamie Smith cut loose.
Mohammad Ali was the more threatening bowler after lunch, rewarded with the dismissals of Smith and Robinson in a single over after the skies darkened and the floodlights came on, but Abbas as ever had the consistency. He came back to dismiss Archer and stand once again on four wickets in a Lord’s Test innings.
The last ball of that over – and, as it turned out, the last of the day – caught the leading edge of Gus Atkinson’s bat and flew over the slip cordon for four, the bowler’s chances of a prized position on that honours board disappearing, for now. He has waited eight years, he can handle one more night.
