BIRMINGHAM — The first ball of Day Four was supposed to be a formality. England needed 130 runs, the Edgbaston pitch was flat, the session was long, and the series already seemed effectively over to most people inside the ground.
Then Mohammad Abbas ran in, found movement from the surface, and sent Ben Duckett’s stumps flying. The next delivery did the same to Emilio Gay. England were 0 for 2. The formality had become something else.
Joe Root walked to the crease in the seventh minute of the morning, joining Jordan Cox, who had been stranded at the non-striker’s end after watching both openers depart in six deliveries. Abbas, the veteran seamer who had moved through the Test without much menace until that moment, had produced the most dramatic over of the series.
Edgbaston held its breath.
By lunch, the match was over. Root finished unbeaten on 62 from 69 balls. Cox, 24, making only his third Test appearance, was unbeaten on 59 from 76. Together they had added 130 not out over 30.2 overs without being parted, and England had won by eight wickets. The 3-0 series sweep was complete — England’s first home Test whitewash of Pakistan, achieved without a single century from any batter on either side across three matches. That last distinction has not occurred in a three-match Test series since 1888, as Yahoo Sports reported.
Abbas did not bowl again after that opening over. What had seemed like the beginning of a last-day drama resolved itself into the kind of batting partnership England produce with unsettling regularity: measured, purposeful, and entirely free of the panic that six balls had briefly made thinkable.
“We had some chaos around us coming into this series,” Root said, careful not to be more specific. “But the cricket has been the answer to everything.”
The chaos he circled was not invisible. Ben Stokes retired from international cricket in June, stepping down from the captaincy he had rebuilt from its lowest point. Brendon McCullum, who arrived alongside Stokes in 2022 and helped design the attacking philosophy that has defined this England side, was sacked before the first ball of this Pakistan series. Root was handed the armband — the same captaincy he had held before Stokes, and held for longer than most people now remember — and asked to keep something alive without its most vocal architects.
He has not merely kept it alive. Three Tests, three victories. The series’ outstanding performer, by some distance, was Ollie Robinson. The Sussex seam bowler claimed 21 wickets across the three matches at an average of 8.76, winning Player of the Series. In this Test alone, Robinson dismissed four Pakistan batters in the first innings for 15 runs and then contributed 50 from number eight in England’s reply of 453, bat and ball combining in the way England were told for years was impossible to sustain.
The match’s individual award went to Dan Lawrence, whose contribution requires a second read. He scored 65 in England’s first innings. He then removed Saim Ayub and Abdullah Shafique in Pakistan’s second innings, finishing with 2 for 17 from 14 overs. The all-round return from a batter who also bowls tidy off-spin is why England’s middle order has stopped being the thing their supporters worry about in the middle of the night. Lawrence is 27. He is improving.
The question of where Pakistan cricket goes from here is not answered at Edgbaston. The squad overhaul that preceded this series — eleven changes, Babar stripped of white-ball captaincy, selectors acting without fully consulting the players most affected — resolved little about the structural turbulence beneath. Masood’s position as Test captain, and the durability of whatever arrangement he holds with the selectors, is an open question. This series has not closed it.
Root’s England carries no such ambiguity about direction. Six balls from Abbas complicated a morning that was supposed to be processional. Root and Cox answered without drama, without acceleration, and without apparent concern. That quality — the ability to absorb a shock and return to the game plan without editorial comment — is the clearest evidence that what Stokes and McCullum built has not been handed to Root as a finished artefact. He has made it his own.
What remains unresolved is whether this England can sustain it away from home. Edgbaston in September is not a hostile Test venue. The blueprint has survived the architects. The sterner proof comes later.
