Pakistan vs England Cricket Rivalry

No fixture has given Pakistani cricket more and cost it more than England.

England is where Pakistan won its first Test outside the subcontinent, in 1954, on a first tour, which no side had managed before. It is where reverse swing first frightened a Test batting order into accusing the bowlers of cheating. It is where a Test match was abandoned over a ball inspection, where three Pakistani cricketers were convicted in a criminal court, and where Pakistan has twice lost a World Cup final and once won one.

It is also the only major fixture in which Pakistan has, over seventy years, been roughly the equal of the opponent. England have not dominated Pakistan the way Australia have. Pakistan has beaten England at home, in England and in the UAE, and England has done the same in reverse. The series ledger between them is close, which is why the individual matches carry so much.

The Oval, August 1954

Pakistan's first tour of England came two years after Test status. They lost at Trent Bridge, and the series looked like the education a new side is supposed to receive.

At The Oval in mid-August, on a wet pitch, Pakistan won by 24 runs. Fazal Mahmood took twelve wickets for 99 in the match, six for 46 in England's second innings. England had been 109 for two chasing and lost the remaining eight wickets inside an hour on the final morning.

It made Pakistan the first side to win a Test on its inaugural tour of England, and it squared the series 1-1. It is difficult to overstate what that did for the standing of a two-year-old cricket nation, and Fazal — a policeman by profession — became the first Pakistani sporting figure known internationally. His bowling on the matting and low pitches of the era is the foundation of the tradition described in the guide to Pakistan's fast bowling tradition.

Headingley, 1987

It took another thirty-three years for Pakistan to win a series in England, and when it came it was won in one Test out of five.

The 1987 tour produced four draws and a single result. At Headingley, England were bowled out for 136 and then for 199. Pakistan made 353 and won by an innings and 18 runs, with Imran Khan taking 7 for 40 in the second innings and contributing with the bat. He was player of the match, and Pakistan had their first series win in England.

The other four Tests were high-scoring stalemates — Pakistan made 708 at The Oval and still could not force a result. That series is a fair portrait of Test cricket in the 1980s: flat pitches, huge totals, and one bowler good enough to make something happen anyway.

1992: the summer of the accusation

The 1992 tour is the one that shaped how England and Pakistan regard each other.

Pakistan won the five-Test series 2-1, taking the second Test at Lord's by two wickets and the fifth at The Oval by ten. Waqar Younis took 22 wickets in the series. Wasim Akram took five in an innings more than once, including six for 67 in the final Test.

They were doing something English batting had not encountered: making an old ball swing late and sharply, into the pads of a right-hander, at pace. After a one-day international at Lord's the two bowlers were reported to the match referee and the British press ran extensive accusations of ball tampering. An inquiry followed. No action was taken against any player and the affair eventually subsided.

What it left was a durable suspicion in both directions — English scepticism that reverse swing could be legitimate, Pakistani conviction that the sport's establishment would not accept a Pakistani innovation without an accusation attached. The technique itself, and how it was developed, is set out in the guide to reverse swing. Career records for the bowlers involved are in the player index.

The Oval, August 2006

Fourteen years later the same argument produced the only forfeited Test in the game's history.

On the fourth day of the fourth Test, umpires Darrell Hair and Billy Doctrove stopped play after a dismissal, examined the ball, concluded it had been altered and awarded England five penalty runs. Pakistan, captained by Inzamam-ul-Haq, did not return to the field after tea in protest. Hair and Doctrove awarded the match to England on a forfeit, giving England the series 3-0.

The ruling was then argued over for years. The ICC changed the result to a draw in 2008 and reversed that decision on 1 February 2009, restoring England's win. Hair did not umpire Pakistan matches again for a considerable period.

Pakistani cricket's reading of the episode has never really changed: that the penalty was imposed without the umpires identifying who had done what, and that the assumption of guilt would not have been made against another side. Whether or not that is right, the events are matters of record, and it is the single most consequential dispute in Pakistan's Test history.

Lord's, August 2010

The 2010 tour was worse, because this time the wrongdoing was real.

England won the four-Test series 3-1. Jonathan Trott made 404 runs. James Anderson took 23 wickets. Mohammad Aamer, nineteen years old and bowling as well as any left-armer since Wasim, took nineteen wickets and shared the player-of-the-series award.

During the fourth Test at Lord's, the News of the World published allegations that an agent, Mazhar Majeed, had taken £150,000 from undercover reporters in exchange for information about no-balls that would be bowled to order. The paper published video of Majeed naming the deliveries in advance. The no-balls were bowled.

The ICC suspended Aamer, Mohammad Asif and the Test captain Salman Butt on 2 September 2010. On 1 November 2011 all three were convicted in an English criminal court and given prison sentences ranging from six to thirty months.

It is the lowest point in the country's cricket history and it happened at Lord's, in the fixture Pakistani cricketers most want to do well in. Aamer served his ban and returned to international cricket, which remains a subject on which Pakistani opinion is genuinely divided.

Dubai, January 2012

Eighteen months later Pakistan produced the most complete series win of the entire fixture, and played it in front of almost nobody.

England arrived in the UAE ranked the best Test side in the world. Pakistan beat them 3-0. Saeed Ajmal took 24 wickets at 14.70 and was player of the series; in the first Test at Dubai he took ten for 97, including a career-best seven for 55 in England's first innings. By the second Test he had become the fastest Pakistani to a hundred Test wickets, in nineteen matches.

England's batters could not read him, and the doosra — a delivery whose legality was disputed for as long as it was bowled — accounted for most of them. It was a whitewash of the world's top-ranked side achieved on neutral ground with negligible crowds, because Pakistan had no home venue. The circumstances that produced those years are described in the guide to Pakistan's home series in the UAE.

2016: two wins each

The 2016 tour of England was the fixture at its best: four Tests, four results, and a drawn series.

Test	Result
Lord's	Pakistan won by 75 runs
Old Trafford	England won by 330 runs
Edgbaston	England won by 141 runs
The Oval	Pakistan won by 10 wickets

At Lord's, Yasir Shah took six for 72 and four for 69, becoming the first leg-spinner to take five in an innings there since 1996 and the only Asian bowler to take ten in a match at the ground. Misbah-ul-Haq made 114 in the first innings and became the oldest captain to score a Test century.

At The Oval, Younis Khan made 218 and Pakistan won by ten wickets to square the series. Joe Root's 254 at Old Trafford was the best innings on the other side.

A 2-2 series between these two, with a leg-spinner and a forty-two-year-old captain deciding the first Test, is the version of the rivalry that both sets of supporters would choose.

Rawalpindi and Multan

The two most recent Test series in Pakistan are worth reading together, because they were won in opposite ways.

England 3-0, 2022-23

England's first Tests in Pakistan since 2005 produced a clean sweep and a batting performance without precedent. At Rawalpindi, England scored 506 runs on the opening day — the most in the first day of any Test — with four centurions, and declared on 657 at 6.50 runs an over, the highest run rate for a Test total above 500. They still needed to win it by 74 runs.

Multan was closer, England winning by 26, and Karachi went to England by eight wickets. Harry Brook made 468 runs across the series. Abrar Ahmed, a debutant leg-spinner, took seventeen wickets for Pakistan; Jack Leach took fifteen.

No side had swept a three-Test series in Pakistan before. That England did it by scoring at a rate nobody had attempted made it harder to draw lessons from.

Pakistan 2-1, 2024-25

Two years later Pakistan won a home series for the first time since 2021, and did it by abandoning the pitches England had feasted on.

The first Test at Multan went spectacularly wrong. England declared on 823 for seven — the fourth-highest total in Test history — with Brook making 317 and Root 262, their partnership of 454 the highest by any England pair, and Root passing Alastair Cook as England's leading Test run scorer. England won by an innings and 47.

Pakistan then dropped their seamers, recalled Sajid Khan and Noman Ali, and played on used and heavily prepared surfaces. In the second Test, also at Multan, the two off-spinners took all twenty England wickets between them — the first time a pair had done that in a Test since 1972. Sajid took seven for 111; Noman took eight for 46, the second-best innings return in any Test played in Pakistan. Pakistan won by 152 runs.

At Rawalpindi, Saud Shakeel made 134 and Noman took six for 42 as England were bowled out for 112. Pakistan won by nine wickets and took the series 2-1.

It was a deliberate, slightly cynical and entirely legitimate answer to being scored at seven an over, and it worked. The domestic system that produced Sajid and Noman, and its repeated restructuring, is examined in the guide to Pakistan's regional cricket reforms. The venue is covered in the guide to Rawalpindi Cricket Stadium.

Two finals at the Melbourne Cricket Ground

The white-ball fixture has produced two World Cup finals, thirty years apart, at the same ground.

In 1992 Pakistan beat England at the MCG to win the fifty-over World Cup, the achievement covered in the guide to Pakistan's 1992 World Cup title.

On 13 November 2022, at the same ground, England beat Pakistan by five wickets in the Twenty20 World Cup final. Pakistan made 137 for eight, Shan Masood top-scoring with 38; England reached 138 for five in nineteen overs, Ben Stokes unbeaten on 52 and Sam Curran taking three for 12 to win the match award. Pakistan had reached the final having lost their first two group matches, to India and Zimbabwe, and having beaten New Zealand in the semi-final by seven wickets.

That symmetry is the fixture in miniature: the same ground, the same opponent, the two most emotionally significant days in Pakistan's limited-overs history, and one of each.

Where it stands

England now tour Pakistan and Pakistan tour England regularly, which was not true for most of the 2010s. Both boards benefit from the fixture; the large British Pakistani population makes an English summer series against Pakistan among the better-attended in the calendar.

The competitive picture is that Pakistan can beat England anywhere and England can beat Pakistan anywhere, which is rarer than it sounds and is the main reason this rivalry has produced better cricket than Pakistan's fixtures against most other sides. The longer national record is in the history of Pakistan cricket, and the rest of the game there sits on the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Sources and method

This page uses official scorecards and series records for the Tests and matches named, ICC tournament documentation for the 1992 and 2022 World Cup finals, ICC and court records for the 2010 spot-fixing case and the sanctions imposed, and the ICC's published decisions on the 2006 Oval result. Where an episode is contested — the 1992 ball-tampering accusations and the 2006 forfeit in particular — the documented sequence of events is given and the competing interpretations are described rather than resolved. Series scorelines and individual figures are as published in match records; nothing here is computed by this site.