All eyes on historic series as England prepare for Pakistan assignment

Now the Leicestershire leg-spinner is part of an England Test squad touring there for the first time since 2005 - and striving to win there for the first time since 2000.

Ahmed, 18, will become England’s youngest men’s Test player if he features in the three-match series that starts in Rawalpindi on Thursday, narrowly beating the record of a certain Brian Close.

There would be no stronger commitment to “Bazball” and the desire to attack than if the Nottingham-born Ahmed is given a go at some point, having been added to the squad last week in recognition of his performances and obvious potential.

While much focus will naturally rest on Ahmed, whose addition is bittersweet in that it serves only to remind that England’s best leg-spinner, Adil Rashid, is no longer part of the Test set-up, this series is significant given the time elapse since the previous visit and the fact that this is England’s first overseas assignment under Mr Bazball himself, head coach Brendon McCullum.

In 2009, gunmen outside the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore fired at the Sri Lanka team bus as it made its way to the venue in an attack that killed six police officers and two civilians.

As a result, international cricket was lost to Pakistan for a decade and a whole generation of players never performed in their homeland, with Pakistan’s fixtures moved instead to the United Arab Emirates.

In the desert wilderness of the intervening period, England first lost 3-0 to Pakistan in the UAE under Andrew Strauss in 2011-12 and then 2-0 under Alastair Cook in 2015-16, having lost 2-0 on their last visit to Pakistan itself under Michael Vaughan in 2005, when an Ashes hangover was perhaps understandable.

Pakistan has always been a hard place for England to win on pitches which are often flatter than a pancake and which usually make for attritional cricket - the polar opposite of “Bazball”.

England, in fact, have won only two of 24 Tests there full stop - the famous victory in the dark in Karachi under Nasser Hussain 22 years ago, after they prevailed in their first Test match there at Lahore in 1961 under the leadership of Ted Dexter.

On both occasions, England won the series 1-0 with the other two matches drawn, with Hussain remembering how, in footballing parlance, winning in Pakistan felt like “winning away at Manchester City”.

Now, in a different era, and with McCullum and captain Ben Stokes having revolutionised the way that England play, it is perhaps the equivalent of winning away at Liverpool - still an extremely tall order but, as Leeds United showed recently, not impossible.

Under McCullum and Stokes, whose approach is more safety-last than safety-first, England won six out of seven Tests last summer and changed the way that the five-day game is played (although not too many matches are likely to last the full five days with those two in charge).

Perhaps that aggressive style will be exactly what the doctor ordered in the challenging conditions of the sub-continent, or maybe the honeymoon period will end in no uncertain terms in the cricketing equivalent of raised voices and ornaments being thrown.

If young Rehan Ahmed was ‘nobbut’ a babe-in-arms in 2005, when Vaughan’s troops headed to Pakistan with the greatest Test series still fresh in the memory, so Harry Brook was a comparative elder statesman at the age of six.

The Yorkshire batsman got his first taste of “Bazball” when he debuted in the final Test of last summer against South Africa at the Oval, making 12 in his solitary innings as England wrapped up a 2-1 series win with a nine-wicket triumph, having made his international debut in a T20 against West Indies in Barbados last January.

If England are to win this time in Pakistan, with the series continuing in Multan (December 9-13) and then concluding in Karachi (December 17-21), Brook could have a big part to play, particularly in a batting line-up deprived of his injured Yorkshire team-mate, Jonny Bairstow.

Brook had an underwhelming T20 World Cup, contributing 56 runs in five innings as England became double white-ball world champions, but he was leading run-scorer with 238 in six innings in the preceding seven-match T20 series in Pakistan, winning the player-of-the-series award as England won that rubber 4-3.

Question marks remain over England’s openers, a combination for this tour of Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett and Keaton Jennings.

It has been a problem for many years, and there is another Ashes series looming next summer.

Pakistan are powerful, dynamic and exciting, but no side will relish playing England at present.

Can “Bazball” translate to winning consistently on foreign soil?

We are about to find out, and it’s unlikely to be dull.