Total collapse

Pakistan's collapse to a 3-0 clean sweep at Edgbaston closes one of the bleakest chapters in the team's recent Test history. The manner of the defeat, an eight-wicket loss with England chasing a modest 130, will sting more than the scoreline itself. The win completes a dominant series for England that had already taken the first Test by an innings and 103 runs and the second by 194 runs. Pakistan have now lost 16 of their past 21 matches and sit at the bottom of the World Test Championship table. They are the record of a team without direction, one that responded to a hammering at Lord's by sending seven players home, sacking head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and assistant Umar Gul, and hoping fresh faces might paper over deeper cracks. Amid that wreckage came a moment worth holding onto. Fast bowler Razaullah, twenty-one years' old and playing his first Test, took four wickets in England's first innings and then walked out at number nine to strike nine sixes and four boundaries in a defiant 81 of just 63 balls, sharing a last wicket stand of 121 with Mohammad Abbas. Razaullah, if groomed properly, can take the place of someone like Abdul Razzaq in this Pakistan side. The raw ingredients are there. A broader strategy is what's missing, and the bleak state of Test cricket in Pakistan makes that harder to ignore. The PCB has to go back to the drawing board. That means building a domestic structure that produces more players like Razaullah before they arrive at the Test level half-formed, and it means giving those who do break through the room to fail without being discarded after one bad series. Nothing that happened at Edgbaston will matter in the long run if the board's response is another reshuffle rather than a rethink.