Pakistan have dropped seven players and released their head coach with one Test of their England tour still to play, an in-series overhaul of a scale rarely attempted by a touring side. The Pakistan Cricket Board confirmed the changes on Monday, 24 hours after England’s 194-run victory at Lord’s sealed the three-match series 2-0 with a game and a day to spare.
Red-ball head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and bowling coach Umar Gul have both been released. Mike Hesson, already Pakistan’s white-ball head coach, takes charge of the Test side for the final match at Edgbaston, beginning on 9 September, with former Australia seamer Ashley Noffke assuming Gul’s responsibilities. Babar Azam remains captain.
Seven out, five uncapped in
Five of the seven released players appeared in the series: wicketkeeper Mohammad Rizwan, opener Imam-ul-Haq, former white-ball captain Salman Ali Agha, Ali Usman and seamer Khurram Shahzad. Aamer Jamal and Mohammad Awais Zafar are flying home without having played a match.
Of the seven replacements, only two have Test caps: Saim Ayub, who has played eight, and Abdullah Fazal, who has played two. The other five have never played the format:
- Arafat Minhas, a left-arm spin-bowling all-rounder with three ODI and four T20I caps
- Mohammad Imran Jnr, a left-arm fast bowler
- Saad Baig, a wicketkeeper-batter and player of the tournament in the 2025-26 Quaid-e-Azam Trophy
- Mohammad Imran Randhawa, a pace-bowling all-rounder
- Razaullah, a pace-bowling all-rounder
Two of the departures carry an edge beyond form. Rizwan was heavily criticised for the manner of his dismissal at Lord’s, while Imam did not bat in the second innings despite taking painkilling injections, having been seen moving freely in the warm-ups. Salman Ali Agha’s release, meanwhile, removes a player who captained the side in the shorter formats as recently as this year.
Four innings, none past 200
The numbers behind the purge are not in dispute. Pakistan were bowled out for under 200 in all four innings of the series: 171 and 135 at Headingley, where England won by an innings and 103 runs inside three days, then 110 and 194 at Lord’s, where they were set 389 and folded before the close on day four.
Saud Shakeel’s 97 in the fourth innings at Lord’s was the only innings of substance any Pakistan batter produced in the match — no one else passed fifty in either innings. The Headingley collapse was starker still: 135 all out in 37.3 overs, the joint second-fastest victory of Joe Root’s captaincy.
England’s bowling made the point emphatically. All 38 Pakistan wickets to fall in the series went to seam. Ollie Robinson and Jofra Archer, bowling in tandem in Test cricket for the first time, took 24 of them between them, with Josh Tongue and Gus Atkinson sharing the other 14. Robinson’s 4 for 24 at Lord’s completed match figures of 8 for 35 from 27 overs and won him the match award; Tongue’s 3 for 46 finished the chase off. Pakistan faced a four-man attack that had never previously played a Test together, and never looked like solving it.
What Edgbaston is now for
Sacking a coach mid-tour and turning over half a squad guarantees nothing at Edgbaston, and the PCB will know it. What the board has done is convert a dead rubber into an audition. Five uncapped players are on a plane to Birmingham because the selectors have decided that the cost of finding out what they can do in English conditions is now lower than the cost of another look at players who have already failed there.
The context is a Test side in sustained decline: five defeats in their last six matches. Pakistan’s problem in this series was not a lack of experience but the failure of it — Rizwan, Imam and Salman have well over a hundred Tests between them and produced almost nothing across four innings. Replacing them with Quaid-e-Azam Trophy performers is a bet that the domestic system is producing better players than the incumbents, a claim Pakistan cricket has made before and rarely tested this bluntly.
Hesson’s appointment is the more consequential move. Handing the white-ball coach the Test side, even temporarily, points towards a single coach across all three formats — a structural simplification Pakistan have circled for years without committing to. Whether Edgbaston becomes the start of that arrangement or a one-match stopgap is the question the next fortnight answers, and it matters more than the result of a match the series has already decided.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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