![]() Pakistan captain Shan Masood celebrates his double century against the Prime Minister’s XI in Canberra. Khurram Shahzad has never played a Test, Mir Hamza has three. Hasan Ali has been patchy for years, in and out of the side while only a couple of times ripping through the opposition. Haris Rauf, the next fastest, has instead opted to play Big Bash. ![]() His highest-quality comrade, Naseem Shah, has been absent injured since before the World Cup. In terms of bowlers of that calibre, the current Pakistan side has Shaheen Shah Afridi but precious little else. 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. 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. 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. This could be seen as a downside, but a player can only rev themselves up so many times. 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. 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.
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