Two weeks ago, nobody had heard of Razaullah Mashwani.
Hailing from a village in the north-west frontier of Pakistan, an area beloved by Rudyard Kipling as the host of scenes of derring-do in the British Empire, Razaullah was found to possess a skill of whanging a cricket ball at a fair lick.
To most Brits, the Khyber Pass was ruled over by Sid James in Carry On Up the Khyber, but is populated by proud and fierce Pashtuns.
Which makes it galling that Razaullah was called up to perform that trickiest of sporting tasks: trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Pakistan’s cricket tour of England this summer was as disastrous as the Donner Party’s trip over California’s High Sierras, with the exception that they did not end up eating each other.
The tour was also a bit of a duffer for catering and corporate hospitality at the Test grounds.
Two days’ worth of canapes, vol-au-vents and quiches were dumped as England wrapped up the first test at Headingley in three days, England’s first innings total of 409 being more than enough as Pakistan could only cobble together 171 and 135 in an innings and 103-run defeat.
Rain saw the second Test lurch into four days, but plenty of sarnies and salad were dumped into the Lord’s skips as England won by 193 runs, with Pakistan (110 and 194) again failing to post a 200-plus score.
At this point the Pakistan Cricket Board showed all the patience and cool-headedness of Chicken Little and not only was head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed sacked halfway through the tour, but seven players were sent home, and packed off to bed with no supper.
Not that they seemed that bothered as they could go off and earn some serious spondulicks playing franchise cricket elsewhere in the world.
Enter Razaullah. With no telephone landlines to his hometown of Nihag, thank goodness for mobile technology.
A week ago, he had no passport, but he was hastily despatched to the photobooth at his local Boots to have his snaps done, and before he could say Peshwari Naan, he was on the plane to Blighty.
In the third test, Pakistan turned up to play and although Razaullah was picked to supplement the bowling attack, he thought he might have had a bit of fun with the bat and swung for the fences at everything in his wheelhouse. In the process he broke two bats but his 81 off 63 balls at least gave England 102 to chase, and took the game into a fourth day, ensuring that only some pasties and pies were dumped.
He did not manage to put the Colgate back in the tube, although he had a decent try and did not leave too much mess around the taps and sink.
But you can’t polish a turd and Pakistan’s tour of England in 2026 was as one-sided as the day General Custer stood on a bluff above the little Bighorn River and said: ‘Where the bloody hell have all these Indians come fr……..’
The sweep meant Pakistan added no points – count ’em, none – to their World Test rankings and they sit ninth out of 10 Tes- playing teams, just above Zimbabwe and below the likes of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
And it begs the question of what has happened to Test cricket in Pakistan?
It’s not as if they have been complete duffers on these shores.
Pakistan have won five Test series in England, the last in 1996, their last on English soil.
Down the years, their great players have graced and garnished the game; batters like Zaheer Abbas, Inzmam-al-Huq, Javed Miandad and Younis Khan were run-making machines.
Pace bowlers like Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Mohammad Abbas and Shoaib Akhtar were as quick as anything on the planet, and spinners such as Saqlain Mushtaq, Danish Kaneria and Abdul Qadir could be as tricky as a bag of snakes and not just on a Lahore dust bowl.
The question of what has happened to Test cricket, and the production line of talent is the same one applied to West Indian cricket, which dominated the world in the 1980s, 90s and early 2,000s.
Such is the paucity of Pakistani cricket at the moment, that there are calls for them to be demoted out of the 10-strong cabal of Test playing nations to let the likes of the Netherlands, Ireland and Afghanistan in.
Most of these calls come, it has to be said, from gloating Indians who revel in their neighbours’ struggles but as India – backed by the almighty money-making machine of the Indian Premier League – wields much power in the ICC, such calls cannot totally be ignored.
At which point, the likes of Razaullah won’t be summoned from the upper reaches of the Khyber Pass and required to put the toothpaste back in the tube, it will require a re-packing of the entire bathroom cabinet.
