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Barrel/fish latest: Pakistan scrape and restock, Ollie Robinson shoots and reloads

King Cricket | Independent and irreverent cricket writing · King Cricket · 2026-09-09T16:22:35+00:00 · nguồn gốc

Edgbaston has a load of “Send money to Pakistan” adverts on the boundary boards for this Test match. At this point in the tour, it’s easy to read that as some kind of charity fundraiser. Why would anyone shoot fish in a barrel? What’s the point? Save your ammo. Shooting fish in a barrel is the kind of over the top, right-wing American thing someone like Pete Hegseth would do to showcase his lethality/masculinity – entirely oblivious to the fact it demonstrates the exact opposite. You want a fish? Just grab one. Even easier: tip the barrel over. There are so many better options than guns. Ollie Robinson strikes us as a harpoon man – just a few accurate jabs and he’ll get his fish. At least we assume that’s how he went about things because the piscine death toll climbed so rapidly this morning we never actually had time to commit the early executions to memory. Whatever Robinson did, he must have extracted plenty of liquid as well, because by the time Josh Tongue was bowling after the drinks break it seemed like the barrel contained more fish than water. It was hard to miss. The only fish batter to emerge in credit was Saud Shakeel, who top scored with 43 after the top five had all failed to reach double figures. Mohammad Abbas – who has never once hit a 50 in over 300 professional appearances – was the second highest scorer with 21. We assume he was inspired by being entrusted with the lofty number 10 slot. The bottom step of what we like to term the top scorers podium was occupied by number nine, Razaullah – a man who at that point had as many Test appearances to his name as names to his Test appearances (which is to say ‘one’). Based on that alone, we imagined further names and Test appearances would follow and indeed, by the evening session, he was already being referred to as ‘Razaullah Khan’. Uplifted by this rapid expansion in nomenclature, he took it upon himself to bowl at least 10mph faster than any other Pakistan bowler all series.