Robinson and Tongue took eight each, and England were finished with Pakistan inside three days

Ollie Robinson and Josh Tongue bowled England to a win at Headingley without much help from anyone else. Robinson finished with 8 for 80 in the match, Tongue with 8 for 89, and Pakistan were bowled out for 135 in their second innings before tea on the third day. England won by an innings and 103 runs.

Two bowlers, sixteen wickets

Robinson and Tongue had already taken all ten between them in the first innings, 5 for 51 and 5 for 46, on a rain-shortened opening day that left Pakistan 171 all out. The second innings followed the same script with Jofra Archer added to it. Archer removed both openers with the new ball, Robinson took three more, and Tongue came on after lunch and took three of his own, including two in the space of four balls.

Pakistan lasted 37.3 overs. Mohammad Rizwan top-scored with 41 off 39 balls and was the last recognised batter out, Gus Atkinson getting him after a long spell that brought nothing else. Salman Agha, captaining because Babar Azam was ruled out the day before the match, made 4.

Robinson took the player-of-the-match award. He and Tongue had bowled the fuller lengths that Headingley usually rewards and that Pakistan’s seamers never really found, which was the difference across three days as much as any individual spell.

England added 43 more and it was already plenty

England resumed on Friday, 21 August at 366 for 8 and added 43 before being bowled out for 409, a lead of 238. Harry Brook’s 91 was the highest score of the match, with Jordan Cox making 73, Joe Root 66 and Dan Lawrence 51. Ali Usman finished with 5 for 95, his first five-wicket haul in Test cricket and the first by a visiting spinner at Headingley since Ashley Mallett in the 1972 Ashes. It bought Pakistan almost nothing.

Archer hit the only six of the match on the third morning. It is that kind of statistic that tells you what the surface was doing.

Root’s first Test back in charge

This was Root’s first match of his second spell as England captain, a job he took over after Ben Stokes retired from Test cricket. He won the toss, bowled first with an all-seam attack, and by the third afternoon had a result.

Root’s 66 also took him past 3,000 runs in the World Test Championship as captain, the first player to get there. Across 34 matches and 63 innings as a WTC captain he now has 3,000 runs at 50.13, with eight hundreds and 13 fifties and a highest score of 228. Stokes is next on that list with 2,182.

His field placements did some of the work on day three. Azan Awais clipped Archer straight to a leg slip, and Saud Shakeel picked out Lawrence at a backward square position that no coaching manual would recognise.

Lord’s next, and the table barely moved

England lead the three-Test series 1-0, with the second Test starting at Lord’s on Thursday, 27 August. Twelve points went on the board and England are still seventh in the World Test Championship standings, which is the part of this that one dominant week cannot fix. India sit fifth on 53.33 per cent, Australia lead on 77.78, and Pakistan are ninth.

Pakistan have five days to work out what to do about a batting order that has now been dismissed for 171 and 135 in the same match, and they may get Babar back for it.

Follow the rest of the England-Pakistan series