The Lahore Review: Why One UltraEdge Spike Outweighed Shadab's 113*

The ball arrived in the 45th over, Gus Atkinson pinned Shadab Khan on the pad, and the finger went up. Shadab swung his bat at the ground. For a few seconds the Gaddafi Stadium had a result: England's players began shaking hands, Joe Root and Harry Brook walked over to him, and the broadcast graphic flashed "England won by 20 runs". Shadab went down on his haunches. Haris Rauf put a hand on his head. The walk back to the pavilion had already begun when Shadab asked for the review. UltraEdge showed a spike. The ball had touched the bat before the pad. The decision flipped, the ground erupted, and a match that had been published as a 20-run defeat was won by one wicket.

I watched this from Dubai, on a single screen, with no crowd in my ears and no corridor access in Lahore. That vantage point needs to be declared up front, because what unsettled me was not a piece of bowling craft. It was that graphic. I went back to the hand tags before I trusted the headline. The headline was 113 not out. The hand tags were the 47.1 overs of the scorecard. I opened the tags first.

Context: the match that looked finished at 154-9

This was a cut-off fixture in the ODI tri-series in Lahore. Put in to bat, England were bowled out for 241 in 46.4 overs. Shaheen Shah Afridi removed Tom Banton in the first over and Joe Root in the third; Rauf accounted for Jordan Cox, and England were 52 for 4. Ben Duckett then made 105 off 111 balls with ten fours and two sixes, adding 93 for the fifth wicket with Sam Curran, who made 42 off 52 before Afridi had him caught. Afridi finished with 4 for 46. England were 201 for 9 when Gus Atkinson's unbeaten 36 dragged them to 241.

Pakistan's reply did not resemble the scoreboard the ground wanted. Fakhar Zaman made 10, Babar Azam 10 — bowled by Atkinson — and Saim Ayub 6. Jamie Overton took two catches in the slips and finished with 3 for 43; Liam Dawson took 2 for 30. Saad Baig's 32 off 22 and Salman Ali Agha's 26 kept the chase breathing, but when Rauf walked out in the 34th over the score was 154 for 9. The target was 242. Eighty-eight runs were needed with one wicket left.

Core: that was not a partnership, it was a one-man haul

The scorecard offers one number before any other: of the 89 runs the tenth wicket added, 82 belonged to Shadab and 7 to Rauf. That was not a partnership in any normal sense; it was a single batter carrying the load, and that is precisely the technical secret of this win. It stands as the highest tenth-wicket stand in a successful ODI chase, but its shape was built less on stroke quality than on the rationing of strike.

Run the arithmetic. Rauf faced 19 balls in total — under a quarter of the roughly 79 deliveries bowled between the 34th over and 47.1. The other 60 Shadab took himself. Of his 96 balls, 18 went for four or six, producing 72 runs; the remaining 78 balls yielded 41, which is the unglamorous work of turning over strike roughly every other delivery. After the 34th over the field was spread and the powerplay was gone, so boundaries had to be manufactured — gaps found, bowlers made to change their line, the first ball of every over kept. Shadab did exactly that. He reached his maiden ODI hundred with a late cut off Atkinson and cleared long-off off the next ball. Pakistan needed three from the last three overs when Rauf hit Henry Crocombe for the winning boundary, finishing on 243 for 9 in 47.1 overs.

One transfer condition belongs here, because every method description I write now carries one. This innings exists inside a rule set of two reviews, UltraEdge and modern fielding restrictions. Under the 2026 conditions — no DRS, no UltraEdge — that innings ends on the umpire's finger. Javed Miandad's last-ball six at Sharjah in 2026 and Shadab's review-assisted finish in Lahore are two different experiments, and putting them on the same scale without naming the rules is bad accounting.

Contrarian: the review, not the innings, was the hinge

Shadab's 113 not out will be carried around on shoulders. I read it differently. The decisive event was the review, and the number that should worry Pakistan is 154 for 9, not 243 for 9. When a top order of Fakhar, Babar and Saim contributes 26 between them, asking the last wicket for 89 is not a repair job — it is a rescue, and rescues do not repeat on schedule. Framing this as Pakistan's comeback DNA is the mythology trap. There was no destiny at work; one batter refused to give up strike and one review happened to be in hand.

For England, the question sits on the death-overs plan. One wicket left, 88 needed: did the captain keep an attacking field or sink into run-saving? The winning boundary came off Henry Crocombe, a far less experienced bowler, while Overton, England's sharpest seamer on the day with 3 for 43, watched. Who bowls overs 44 to 47 is the question England should have answered before this match, not after it. And that graphic — "England won by 20 runs" — is not a technical glitch. It is an evidence-hygiene problem: a result published before the chain of evidence had closed, the exact habit that makes us trust tickers over scorebooks.

Takeaway: the final depends on a repair Pakistan has not yet made

Pakistan are in the final and meet Sri Lanka in their last league game on Tuesday, having beaten them by 37 runs in the opener. England have lost three in a row — by 87 to Pakistan, then to Sri Lanka off the last ball. I have written that Sri Lankan 430 chase into my notebook, but I will not call it a record until I have the scorecard in front of me.

Read the calendar as a load chart: 47.1 overs of chasing in Lahore heat, 96 balls inside it, and the next fixture three days later. This was Shadab's first match of the tournament, and he carried more weight in one evening than any medical file would recommend. My projection, with the error bar attached: if Pakistan's top three do not aggregate 100 across the next two games, the final will not offer another tenth-wicket rescue. That projection dies the moment Fakhar, Babar and Saim put on a hundred together. The question is not how good Shadab is. It is whether Pakistan want their final to depend on another miracle or on a top order they fix first.