England vs Pakistan: After teasing out Joe Root, Yasir Shah ties home team in knots

Spinners rarely shape Test matches at Lord’s, so the convention goes, but Pakistan’s cricketers have never been slaves to orthodoxy as Yasir Shah revealed when he took five wickets with his wrist-spin to become the second Pakistan player to add their name to the famous honours boards here in as many days.

In a entrancing spell from the Pavilion End, itself a counter-intuitive move given the slope is against his stock ball the leg-spinner, Yasir dismissed Joe Root, James Vince, Gary Ballance, Jonny Bairstow. He later added Moeen Ali, from the other end, to put Pakistan in decent shape with three days remaining.

Root was a particularly notable scalp. Having pretty much played a flawless knock to reach 48 Root, having just struck Yasir for four through the leg-side, tried to dominate him by reaching his fifty with a slog-sweep over mid-wicket. But the ball turned and bounced more than he anticipated and the resulting top edge was taken by Mohammad Hafeez at mid-wicket.

This is Yasir’s first Test outside Asia and if he was feeling his way in the conditions, Root’s wicket settled him. Thereafter he dictated terms to the batsmen, none of them appearing to pick his googly including Bairstow, who was the only one to dominate him until a bad misjudgment cost him his wicket.

James Vince, who appears less convincing the longer he has spent in the team, can probably count himself a little unlucky after he was lbw playing back to a flat, skidder - a ball Shane Warne used to refer to as his zooter or slider. The ball, which replays showed to have been just clipping leg-stump, meant that Vince’s review stayed with the umpire’s original decision, which after due care and attention, had been given out.

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Ballance, restored to the side without due cause, played outside a leg-spinner that turned and would have hit middle stump. Yasir is short, so if the spin defeats a batsman they won’t be saved by it going over the top, as Ballance discovered when Alastair Cook, batting at the other end, told him to forget any ideas of a review and keep walking.

Bairstow, still brimming with confidence from the Sri Lanka series, struck him for a few boundaries, including one where he essentially strong-armed him to long-on. But the idea that dominance should be all pervasive rather than selective meant he tried to open up other scoring areas, a decision that did for him when he was bowled trying to cut a ball that had both length and slope against it, an optical illusion that seems exclusive to talented wrist-spinners.

His five-wicket haul was completed when he had Moeen Ali adjudged lbw after the left-hander missed a sweep. Like Vince’s lbw, it was not plumb, Moeen’s review staying with the umpire’s original out decision despite two of the three parameters required to trigger a dismissal being marginal.

Yasir is a late starter to Test cricket, playing his first Test at the age of 29 after Saeed Ajmal was forced to remodel his bowling action. But he has made up for lost time by becoming the quickest to 50 Test wickets for Pakistan, a milestone he reached in nine Tests.

This Lord’s Test is his 13th and his tally has now reached 81 wickets, a remarkable haul especially given he was banned for three months after testing positive for a prohibitive substance, an aberration he puts down to taking his wife’s blood pressure pills by mistake (he has his own anti-hypertensives but they look similar).

While finger sinners rarely dominate at Lord’s, wrist-spinners have often succeeded. Warne took 19 wickets at 19.7 in his four Tests here (though he never got on the boards), while Mushtaq Ahmed and Abdul Qadir, both of whom played two Tests here, took 11 and seven wickets respectively. Mushtaq is also Pakistan’s bowling coach and watched with pride from the dressing-room balcony.

That three of the leg-spinners to do well here in the last 30 years have been from Pakistan more or less proves Imran Khan’s contention that English batsmen have a genetic predisposition to playing leg-spin badly. Yasir, who hails from Pakistan’s Northwest frontier province, is just the latest member of that genus to flourish.

The bad news for England is that Yasir has taken these wickets on a second day pitch, on which the surface is still bound together. It is frightening to think what he might be capable of were wear and tear to start giving him a hand.