If you’re the sort of Australian cricket observer who only notices the home summer, you might be thinking that the lead-up to this Test season feels strangely low-key. A late start well into December, Western Australian cricket officials publicly nervous about crowds, and coverage fixated on retired fast bowler Mitchell Johnson taking a few potshots at former teammates – none of it reflects anticipation of the series against Pakistan.
If you’re someone who has followed the team’s exploits away from home, you might be almost as exhausted as the players. The year about to end has been an epic. Four Tests in India, six in England, returning the Ashes and yielding a World Test Championship trophy. Then headlong into near on two months of a fifty-over World Cup, winning that too with much the same group of players.
Nine of the likely XI for the Perth Test were on that World Cup trip, with only opening bat Usman Khawaja and spinner Nathan Lyon missing out. With little time to make the transition, they all have to change their focus to a task that doesn’t have the same clear emotional peak. This could be seen as a downside, but a player can only rev themselves up so many times. Perhaps it will be a blessing for these players to have a relative absence of hype, against an opponent short of both star power and firepower.
Pakistan teams have only ever won four Tests in Australia: three when Sarfraz Nawaz and Imran Khan took apart some mediocre teams in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and one in 1995 when Mushtaq Ahmed spun them out in Sydney supported by pace from Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. Even then Pakistan never won more than once a tour, never won a series, and the most recent win came while Paul Keating was prime minister.
In terms of bowlers of that calibre, the current Pakistan side has Shaheen Shah Afridi but precious little else. His highest-quality comrade, Naseem Shah, has been absent injured since before the World Cup. Haris Rauf, the next fastest, has instead opted to play Big Bash. Hasan Ali has been patchy for years, in and out of the side while only a couple of times ripping through the opposition. Khurram Shahzad has never played a Test, Mir Hamza has three.
In the meantime, Pakistan’s lone warmup match in Canberra against the Prime Minister’s XI put a lot of overs into the touring bowlers and precipitated a knee injury for Abrar Ahmed, the leg-spinner whose aggressive bowling has been a recent revelation. Without him, Pakistan’s spin stocks consist of finger-spinners Noman Ali and Sajid Khan, both of whom struggled for effect when Australia visited the flat tracks of Pakistan in 2022.
That leaves a lot of responsibility for the new captain, after the former occupant was pressured out of the post. Babar Azam remains in the side as Pakistan’s best bat, but could not survive as leader in any format after another World Cup failure. Shan Masood has taken his place, an elegant stroke player and impressive character in person but one whose Test record has shown plenty of glimpses without ever nailing the brief. No matter the surface, his double century in that warmup match should do him the world of good.
For Australia, selection starts as one more series of set and forget. Patrick Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and the returning Lyon will do the bowling, just as they first did during the Gabba Ashes Test of 2017. No principal bowling quartet has played together as often, with the bowlers eyeing their 24th appearance in harness.
Alex Carey will take care of that group behind the stumps, and will want to find some batting confidence after being replaced in the job during the World Cup. Then the standard batting order will surely unroll: Khawaja partnering the soon-to-be-retired David Warner up top, Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith getting expressive with one another in the middle, Travis Head with licence to attack from five.
The only thing that has changed from the early Ashes matches is that Mitchell Marsh has locked himself in at number six thanks to his batting, though as a bowler can’t offer the suite of options available to fellow all-rounder Cameron Green.
Barring injuries, that could be the only selection decision Australia will need to make this series. Interest will build if individual feats take place, but really what it needs is Pakistan bucking history to offer more competition than their on-paper squad suggests. Get that happening, and these Tests could be worth their place among the peak moments of 2023.
