Pakistan sent seven players home for a dead rubber, and five of the replacements have never played a Test
England won the series at Lord’s on 30 August. Pakistan’s answer was to change half the squad and both coaches before a third Test that decides nothing.
Sep 4, 2026
England won the series at Lord’s on Sunday 30 August, bowling Pakistan out for 194 chasing 389. The third Test at Edgbaston, starting on Wednesday, decides nothing. Pakistan have responded to a dead rubber by sending seven players home, flying seven more out to replace them, and removing the head coach and the bowling coach as well.
Five of the incoming players have never played a Test match.
Who goes and who arrives
Mohammad Rizwan, Salman Ali Agha, Imam-ul-Haq, Ali Usman, Aamir Jamal, Muhammad Awais Zafar and Khurram Shahzad are all out. Imam was absent hurt in both innings at Lord’s with a calf tear. The rest were dropped, Salman Agha among them, ten days after he captained the side in the first Test at Headingley.
In come Saim Ayub and Abdullah Fazal, who have played Tests before, plus five who have not: Arafat Minhas, Saad Baig, Mohammad Imran Jnr, Razaullah and Mohammad Imran Randhawa. Babar Azam, who took the captaincy for Lord’s, keeps it. Sarfaraz Ahmed is out as head coach and Umar Gul as bowling coach, with white-ball head coach Mike Hesson taking the Test side at Edgbaston and Ashley Noffke alongside him.
Several of the new names have earned a look on merit. Minhas is the only Pakistan bowler to take five wickets on ODI debut, against Australia in Rawalpindi earlier this year, and he had a strong first-class season with both bat and ball last year as well. Saad Baig scored 1000 runs at 55.55 in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy and was player of the tournament as Karachi Region Blues won it. Razaullah is 21, has 30 first-class wickets at 20.86 from eight matches and three five-fors in 14 innings. Randhawa is the opposite sort of selection, a seamer who made his first-class debut in 2015-16 and has 110 wickets from 58 matches.
The players are not the problem here. The week is. England have won the first two Tests inside three days and four, and the men asked to change that arrive with a coaching staff appointed nine days before the toss.
Naqvi’s defence
PCB chair Mohsin Naqvi spoke to Geo Network and did not sound like a man reconsidering. “We are answerable for results and what happened in the last two matches is wrong,” he said. “We are not left with any option if a player is not performing but to look for his replacement. The purpose behind these changes is not to axe players from contention, but just to replace them.”
He rejected the idea that Pakistan cricket is collapsing, pointing at the white-ball record under Hesson: fifth in the ODI rankings, up from eighth, and sixth in T20Is, up from ninth. “Did cricket come to an end in South Africa and India after they lost to Namibia and Ireland?” he asked. He said criticism of the players had gone too far and that some of it was really aimed at removing him.
Shahid Afridi and Shoaib Malik both said publicly they disagreed with the overhaul. Aaqib Javed, the PCB’s director of high performance, went the other way and promised an inquiry into Imam’s injury, saying he could not accuse the opener of faking it but that a muscle pull like that should not stop a batter batting at all.
The record the changes are meant to fix
Pakistan have lost 15 of their last 20 Tests. They are bottom of the World Test Championship table, which is where they finished the previous cycle too. They were well inside the top ten in the Test rankings at the start of 2024 and are eighth now. They have not reached the semi-final of any of the last four ICC events.
Set that list beside the response and the mismatch is hard to miss. Seven players did not produce a five-year slide. Rizwan and Salman Agha are among the better cricketers Pakistan have, and Naqvi effectively conceded the point himself, calling Agha a very good player who could not click.
The white-ball comparison cuts against him as well. Hesson has had the ODI and T20I sides since May 2025 and a settled group to work with. The Test side has had a new arrangement roughly every year and now gets a third one in the middle of a series. If the white-ball improvement proves anything, it is that continuity is what produced it.
What Edgbaston is actually for
There is a version of this that makes sense. Pakistan’s remaining fixtures in this cycle are at home to Sri Lanka and New Zealand, on pitches nothing like Edgbaston, and a selector who wants to know what Razaullah looks like against a full-strength England is entitled to find out. Losing 3-0 costs nothing that 2-0 has not already cost.
The trouble is that this does not read as a plan being carried out in an awkward week. It reads as a reaction to a bad Sunday, and Pakistan have had plenty of those. Five debutants dropped into Edgbaston in September stand a fair chance of coming home with figures that make them easier to leave out than they were before they got on the plane, which is close to the opposite of what a rebuild is for.
The Test starts on Wednesday. Babar will name a side containing players who have never shared a Test dressing room with most of their team-mates, against an attack that has bowled Pakistan out for 171, 135, 110 and 194 in the last three weeks.