“If he does miss out, it will give someone else an opportunity”, he said”.
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England were dominating right from the word go, after setting a mammoth total of 589 for 8 in 1st innings, they made Pakistan fall on 198.
Root took England to the brink of victory when the part-time off-spinner struck second ball to have Wahab Riaz caught off a top-edged sweep by Cook. “Our batting always struggles on surfaces with bounce that is why we toil in England and Australia”, Akhtar said.
An ECB spokesman confirmed the injury was to Stokes’ right calf and said he would not bowl again on the fourth day.
Cook’s opposite number Misbah-ul-Haq had to reflect on a reversal of fortune, after the highs of Lord’s for Pakistan.
“Maybe it was a bit of tiredness, I don’t know, but I think there was a big difference”. But the cricketing gods…Cook’s comments, left ominously dangling in the air, came after his former England team-mate Tim Bresnan tweeted his reaction to the Pakistani press-ups: ‘That might bite you, boys. At Lord’s the conditions suited Pakistan because of the low bounce.
Cook and Root scored 506 runs between them for just twice out at Old Trafford.
“I expected players of the calibre of Younis Khan and Asad Shafiq to get hundreds here”. The pitch was good for batting.
“I don t see there s any reason to panic just at the moment”, said Bayliss.
England levelled the series with the recent victory and they will be hoping to keep the momentum going for the third Test, which gets underway on August 3. The lack of application shown by the batsman is what irked the former players.
The fact remains that England still need to see Rashid in action before the winter tours to Bangladesh and, more pertinently, India, where conditions will nearly certainly demand two spinners.
But at Old Trafford he returned expensive figures of one for 266. Legendary players such as Waqar Younis and Shoaib Akhtar were disappointed by Pakistan’s display, calling it “spineless”.
This was England’s fifth-biggest Test win in terms of runs.
He combines the two expertly, and there was no better example of that than at Manchester, where he played with more freedom as the match progressed and was in full one-day mode by the time England declared for the second time.
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Waqar also felt that the Pakistan Cricket Board really needed to take up on war footing the issue of foreign teams not touring Pakistan.
