Aatif, were you aware of this as you were watching your first ever, uh, series and just falling in love with Pakistan cricket?

Yeah, well, you sort of pick up on bits of it.

I, I remember it vividly, um, as my sort of first memory.

You'd go off to school, and you'd come home, and you'd ask your mom, "What's the score? What's the score? What's the score?" It was, it was that era before the internet where you relied on things like CFAX and, and the newspapers, which you never normally cared about.

But because there's this test, test series happening, you wanna look at the back pages and see exactly who did what in these really lyrical descriptions of cricket players.

And you, you've got to understand, in '92, uh, the Pakistan cricket team, they, they were like gods to their fans.

They'd all, all of a sudden achieved something that was so remarkable, and you were told constantly about this achievement by people around you that, you know, this team has won a World Cup.

Yes, at Old Trafford.

They're not just not maybe getting through the system and selected.

Yeah.

There's, there's a lot of talent in Pakistan.

Every year we have the PSL take place, and we see some, you know, really exciting prospects from Pakistan.

This year everybody's been talking about Sameer Minhas, who's like a batting all-rounder for Pakistan, uh, a young man who just featured in the under-19s team in the Under-19s World Cup.

And then there's also a player called Abdul Subhan coming through.

There's Ali Raza, who's a quick bowler, who's already represented Pakistan in, in, uh, white-ball cricket.

Or is that something that's more recent?

... is that, is that where it's coming from?

It is.

It's, it's sort of, it's a political system that's been applied to the cricket board, you know? Like, that's what happens in, in politics, right? Some- you've got to find somebody to blame for a certain thing or certain policy that's gone wrong, you sack them, and that's kind of what's happened in the cricket board as well.

Now, there was a lot of sort of, uh, eh, there was a little bit of optimism coming into the series.

Now, England were always heavy favorites in this series, but you was expecting a contest, especially as Pakistan had just broken their run of eight consecutive away losses in test matches.

So you thought, "Okay, they got a win in that second test against the West Indies." You know, uh, players getting hundreds, players getting runs, players taking wickets.

You think, "Okay, there's reason to be optimistic." They were superb at beckoning them as well.

[laughs]

No worries.

Yeah, I, I mean, it's, it's, it's atrocious really.

It was a really irredeemable performance that they gave at Headingley, and, and there's so many reasons for it.

Part of it is just a really bad pathway into the test team at the moment, and just what I personally feel, um, is just a, a, a de-prioritization of red ball cricket in Pakistan, a lack of clarity around red ball cricket in Pakistan.

I mean, we sometimes hear people chat about county cricket in England and how it's always changing, and there's not enough of it, and do the big players play? I mean, the setup in Pakistan is absurdly confusing.

I mean, it's gone from a department center, uh, a system whereby like, you know, the railways would play against the energy companies would play against the airlines would play against a bank of some sort.

Like, this was the setup for, you know, several decades, and then, um, in 2022 that was revised to being region-based, and then it was revised to being, um, uh, department based again without ever offering any clarity about standards or any kind of uniformity.

Yeah.

knowEh, what do you reckon, Atherton?

I think, I don't know, like I t- I think you have to think about it through the prism of what England cares about.

So England doesn't care about the World Test Championship.

England doesn't care about this Pakistan series really.

I mean, they'd like to win it obviously, but it's not the end of the world.

What England really cares about is the Ashes, right? So like English cricket fans, the English Cricket Board, like the whole setup is about the Ashes, the Ashes, the Ashes.

How do we win the next Ashes? How do we make sure it's like, not like this huge embarrassment as it was this winter in Australia? So I think with that in mind, they're thinking for the next sort of 18 months, Root is our guy for 18 months.

[laughs]

I've given you just a flurry of top lines there, but what are your kind of like, like overall feelings both as a neutral and analyzing Bangladesh, but also from a Pakistan perspective?

Well, I mean let's look at it sort of broad terms, but like you said, I think, you know, for Bangladesh this is huge.

You know, it's not huge because they've beaten a team that's so much better than them or anything like that.

It's huge for Bangladesh 'cause there's now, they've now beaten Pakistan in four consecutive tests, as you say, home and away.

And they've done it in particular these two matches.

They've done it in a way that where they were pretty much in control of the game throughout.

Like there were little phases where Pakistan sort of, you know, were on top.

What, what do you make of him?