Pakistan add Shafique and Shakeel to their Test squad after Fazal’s back injury
A lower-back injury on the eve of the first Test has cost Pakistan their newest opener, and brought a recalled Abdullah Shafique and an early-arriving Saud Shakeel to Trinidad.
Jul 26, 2026
Pakistan have sent for reinforcements a day into a Test they are already playing. Abdullah Shafique and Saud Shakeel will join the squad in Trinidad and stay with it for the rest of the West Indies tour and the three Tests in England that follow.
Shafique comes in as the formal replacement for Abdullah Fazal, who hurt his lower back in training at the Brian Lara Cricket Academy on Thursday and has been ruled out of both assignments after a scan. Shakeel is the extra body, added to a batting order that suddenly looks thin.
A recall built on old numbers
Shafique has not played a Test since October 2025, and the case for him rests on a version of his career that ended a while ago. His first eight Tests brought 856 runs at an average above 65. His last 31 innings have brought 754 at 25.13, and the most recent nine of those have produced 136 runs between them. Pakistan have gone back to a batter they know rather than reach for someone untried in the middle of a World Test Championship cycle. On current form it does not fix much.
The recall also says something about how quickly this selection panel changes its mind. Shaheen Shah Afridi, Hasan Ali and Noman Ali were all left out of these two tours when the squads were named at the start of July. Fazal, one of the players picked ahead of them, lasted until the eve of the first Test.
Shakeel arrives ahead of schedule
Shakeel was omitted from both squads over fitness concerns, and high-performance director Aqib Javed had said he would rejoin the side in England once he was right. Fazal’s injury has moved that timetable up. Shakeel has 1,802 runs in 23 Tests at 43.95 with four hundreds and ten fifties, which makes him the most productive middle-order batter Pakistan can call on.
The caveat is where those runs came from. His double hundred in Galle and his series-winning 134 in Rawalpindi were built on slow, low surfaces. In South Africa and Australia he managed 213 runs in ten innings and Pakistan lost all five Tests. Trinidad in July and Headingley in August are not Karachi.
His presence should still change the shape of the side. In Tarouba, Pakistan named six specialist batters rather than the seven they have usually gone with, pushing allrounder Aamer Jamal up to No. 7 and leaving a longer tail than they would like. Shakeel gives them the option of restoring the extra batter at Queen’s Park Oval next week.
Where the tour stands
Pakistan need the help now rather than later. West Indies closed a rain-shortened opening day on 194 for 3, Kavem Hodge unbeaten on 83 and Shai Hope on 39, the pair together for an unbroken stand of 88. Only 67 overs were possible before bad light ended play.
The second Test starts at Queen’s Park Oval in Port of Spain on 2 August. Then come Headingley on 19 August, Lord’s on 27 August and Edgbaston on 9 September. That is five away Tests in seven weeks, all of them in conditions that suit the bowlers Pakistan will be facing.
Fazal, 23, deserved better than to miss them. He scored 60 and 66 on debut against Bangladesh in May, becoming only the sixth Pakistan batter with a fifty in each innings of a first Test, and had runs behind him in the warm-up game in the Caribbean. He was in line to open on Saturday.