LAHORE: With the captaincy soap opera finally settled, attention turns to the cricket itself – and to a squad that is walking into two of the sport’s most demanding away assignments with remarkably little first-hand experience of either. Of the 16 players named for the West Indies leg, only four have ever played a Test there. Of the 17-man squad for England – which includes Saud Shakeel, joining for that leg only – just five have played a Test on English soil.

That is not, on its own, a selection failure. It is a symptom of the modern calendar: since 2019, the ICC World Test Championship has locked each side into three home and three away series, mutually agreed between boards, every two years, leaving little room for the kind of exploratory tours that once built up a squad’s away experience over time. Pakistan are hardly alone in arriving somewhere unfamiliar more often than they’d like.

What the tourists do have, though, is a hard core of five players who have already done this – some of them more than once, and with genuine success to show for it.

Babar Azam (captain)

No one in the squad carries more Caribbean and English pedigree than the captain himself. Across four tours between 2016-17 and 2021-22, Babar has played five Tests in the West Indies and four in England, for a combined 592 runs.

His first tour of the Caribbean, in 2016-17, produced 72, nine not out, 55 and three ducks — an up-and-down series that nonetheless hinted at what was to come. He returned in 2021-22, this time as captain, and looked a different player: 30, 55, 75 and 33, considerably more consistent even without the big score his numbers still lack in these conditions.

England has been kinder in patches but crueller in others. Babar has totalled 263 runs with three half-centuries there, across the 2018 and 2020 tours, but the 2018 trip is remembered for how it ended rather than how it went: batting on 68 not out in his only innings, at Lord’s, he broke his elbow and missed the rest of the series. He returned in 2020 with a tidier if unspectacular series – 69, 5, 47, 11 and 63 not out – good enough to keep the runs ticking over, but still without the hundred that would put this rivalry to bed.

If Babar is chasing one number above all others on this trip, it is a century against either side – something that has eluded him in nine Tests across both countries.

Imam-ul-Haq (opener)

Left-handed opener Imam-ul-Haq has played 27 Tests since his debut in Dublin in 2018, and yet, oddly, almost none of that experience has come in these two countries. He has never played a Test in the West Indies, and this will be only his second tour of England, following a modest series in 2018 in which he made 4, 18 not out, 0 and 34.

For a batter with his volume of Test experience elsewhere, this tour represents genuinely uncharted territory — and an opportunity to close one of the more surprising gaps in his résumé.

Mohammad Abbas (fast bowler)

If anyone in this squad can claim to know these conditions, it’s Abbas. He has played Pakistan’s last two tours of both the West Indies and England, and has taken wickets in bulk everywhere he’s gone: 15 in three Tests on the 2016-17 Caribbean tour, and six more in two Tests in 2021-22. In England, the numbers are near-identical – 15 wickets in five Tests, split 10 in two Tests in 2018 and five in three Tests in 2020.

Part of that comfort comes from beyond international cricket: Abbas has played county cricket for Leicestershire, Hampshire and Nottinghamshire, giving him a working knowledge of English conditions that few of his teammates can match.

On both tours, he is likely to be the bowler Pakistan lean on most heavily.

Mohammad Rizwan (wicketkeeper-batter)

Rizwan’s numbers tell a story of quiet consistency behind the stumps and in front of them. Across his two previous tours of England and the West Indies, he has scored 255 runs and claimed 17 dismissals.

Under Azhar Ali in England in 2020, he made 161 runs in three Tests and took six catches and stumpings; under Babar Azam in the West Indies in 2021-22, he added 94 runs in two Tests and 11 more dismissals. It is a modest but reliable record – exactly the kind of foundation a touring wicketkeeper needs when the batting around him is largely unproven in these conditions.

Shan Masood (top-order batter)

Shan is the last man standing from Misbah-ul-Haq’s celebrated 2016 tour of England – the one still remembered for the press-up celebrations at Lord’s – though his own contribution was modest: two Tests, 71 runs.

He toured the West Indies the following year, playing one Test for 30, before returning to England under Azhar Ali in 2020 and producing the best form of his career in these conditions: 179 runs in three Tests, built around a defiant 156 in the series opener at Old Trafford.

Of the five, Shan’s Old Trafford innings remains the single best individual performance produced by anyone in this squad on either continent — a reminder of what’s possible when Pakistan’s batters do find their range away from home.

The bigger picture

Taken together, these five careers cover barely a third of the squad, and outside of them the cupboard of Caribbean and English experience is close to bare. Whatever happens over the next two months, Babar, Imam, Abbas, Rizwan and Shan will carry an outsized share of the responsibility for translating experience into results – because for almost everyone else in this squad, Tarouba and the grounds of England will be entirely new territory.