Pakistan hired a batting coach 15 days before Headingley, and the fortnight before it explains why
Michael Smith arrives on a two-year deal with 71 for 9 at Tarouba and Abdullah Shafique’s unbeaten 160 both sitting in the same fortnight of evidence.
Aug 5, 2026
Pakistan appointed a batting coach on 4 August. Their first Test in England starts on 19 August. Fifteen days is not a lot of time to fix anything, and the fortnight that preceded the appointment was a reasonable summary of why the job exists at all.
Who Pakistan have hired
Michael Smith is 46 and South African, and the PCB has given him a two-year term covering both red-ball and white-ball cricket. He played from 2003 to 2013: 89 first-class matches, 72 List A games, 16 T20s, 7,029 runs in all, nine hundreds and 40 fifties. That is a domestic career rather than an international one, which is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up.
What he does have is a long history inside Pakistani cricket. Smith has worked at three PSL franchises, Islamabad United, Karachi Kings and Multan Sultans, so he arrives knowing the players and the environment rather than learning both on a tour of England. He has also been batting coach at the Hobart Hurricanes and with Cricket Tasmania, and has consulted for KZN Inland and Eastern Province. He is a Level 4 qualified coach. His first assignment is Headingley on 19 August.
Two innings, two weeks apart
The clearest picture of what Smith inherits comes from the current tour of the West Indies, because Pakistan’s batting produced both of its extremes inside a fortnight.
At Tarouba in late July, chasing 211 on a worn surface, they were bowled out for 120 in 40.2 overs and lost by 90 runs. Jayden Seales took five. Pakistan were 71 for 9 at one stage, and only a last-wicket stand of 49 between Babar Azam and Mohammad Abbas made the scorecard readable at all. Babar finished 58 not out, which tells you how little was happening around him.
Then at the Queen’s Park Oval, Abdullah Shafique batted 323 balls for an unbeaten 160 with 15 fours and three sixes, and Pakistan made 387. It was the first score of 150 or more by a Pakistan batter in a Test in the West Indies since Majid Khan’s 167 in Guyana in 1977, a gap of 49 years. Sajid Khan and Ali Usman then had West Indies six down in the second innings with the match still live.
So the raw material is there. Consistency is the thing that is not, and that is a harder problem than technique, because it usually sits somewhere between method and nerve.
The captain has not scored a Test hundred since 2022
Babar Azam leads this side, and his own numbers are the loudest argument for the appointment. His last Test century came in December 2022 against New Zealand at Karachi. At Port of Spain he got to 88 and was run out by a direct hit from Brandon King at short cover when Shafique turned down a tight single, which is a fittingly cruel way to extend a wait of nearly four years.
Nothing in Babar’s game looks broken. He made 58 not out out of a wreck at Tarouba and 88 in Port of Spain. He has simply stopped converting, and a captain who cannot convert sets a tone that runs through the order beneath him.
The team position matches. Pakistan sat bottom of the 2025-27 World Test Championship table after the defeat at Tarouba, which is the context in which a batting appointment gets made in the first week of August.
England is a hard place to start
Three Tests, at Headingley from 19 August, Lord’s from 27 August and Edgbaston from 9 September. Pakistan have not won a Test series in England since 1996, when they took it 2-0 and Mushtaq Ahmed took 17 wickets. Thirty years is a long time for a country that has produced as many good batters as Pakistan has.
Smith gets a few sessions in the nets before Headingley and a squad that has just spent a month in the Caribbean playing on surfaces that behave nothing like an English August. Whatever he changes will not show up in the first Test, and possibly not in the series. The two-year contract is the more interesting number here than the fifteen days.