3 minute read

It was a win that England were racing to catch from the outset. The Test began with Zak Crawley hitting three fours off Naseem Shah’s opening over and it ended with the light meters out. Ben Stokes’ men never really slowed in between.

Even if England hadn’t won, you’d have to respect the effort. It’s hard to improve on 657 in 101 overs in your first innings and you could certainly forgive a side for failing to take 20 wickets on the same pitch.

England could barely have done more. That it was only just enough puts all that batting impatience into perspective.

The haste

To quickly recap, England reached 500 quicker than any team ever has before. It was really bloody weird. It was like they’d deployed not just one, but a whole herd of Virender Sehwags – their four centurions all scored at somewhere around a run a ball, or, in Harry Brook’s case, significantly quicker.

With the ball, they needled and wheedled and just about managed to avoid giving up. Credit to Pakistan for almost persuading them to do so. Replying to a first innings like England’s can’t be an easy job.

Then it was England’s second innings. In for a penny, in for a thousand pounds: 264-7 in 36 overs – an effort that did as much to keep Pakistan’s hopes alive as it did their own. Perhaps in making the running, they kidded themselves they were the only team that could win and so enabled that decisive effort with the ball in the dying light on the fifth day.

But what if it had all gone wrong?

How much of a risk?

“There may be a time where you risk losing to win and if Pakistan are good enough to beat us, that’s cool too,” said England’s coach Brendon McCullum before this series began.

That’s easy enough to say at the outset and it sounds even better when your approach has been vindicated with a win. But what’s everyone’s take if England had fallen flat on their arses in that first innings? Or if Pakistan had hared along to their fourth innings target and all of those earlier efforts had been in vain? How cool would that have been?

We wouldn’t say we’d have been 100% fine with it. But we’d have been cool enough.

Risking defeat in pursuit of victory is always admirable and often productive and that’s why it’s one of Stokes and McCullum’s central tenets. However, in the modern era, the upsides also outweigh the downsides to an even greater degree.

There will always be a point at which proactivity becomes irresponsibility but we’d argue that point is further along than it used to be.

Think of the matches you remember. Then do the impossible and think of all the matches you don’t remember. The relentless tsunami of international fixtures means there are probably quite a lot of the latter these days. A lot of cricket simply gets washed away.

That’s the basis of the equation here: victory and defeat aren’t really of equal weight. We remember both the good wins and the great wins, but only really the absolutely godawful losses – and even those we don’t tend to dwell on. And at least they’re colourful.

So why not risk losing? In the grander scheme of things, what would actually be lost?

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