Ben Stokes has been ruled out of the first Test against Pakistan, which starts in Multan on Monday. He is also a doubt for the second, with his recovery from a hamstring tear ahead of schedule but not yet complete.
“I tried my hardest to get myself fit for this first game, but I’ve taken the call to miss this one,” he said. “Looking at the bigger picture around what we’ve got coming up and physically where I’m at with my rehab, I’m not quite ready to play.”
Stokes sustained the injury while playing for Northern Superchargers in the Hundred in August and missed the Test series against Sri Lanka that completed England’s red-ball summer. Ollie Pope stood in as captain for that series and will continue in that role here, while Brydon Carse will make his Test debut in the opening game.
With the second Test, also being played in Multan, starting next Tuesday Stokes has a fresh but looming target and says he is not sure he will make it. “I’ve had to push myself incredibly hard, work really hard with the medical team, to get to where we are now,” he said.
“I’m further ahead than what we expected today and I’ll be working just as hard over the next 10 days to try and give myself a chance of being fit for the second Test.”
While this year’s round of central contracts will be announced this month, Stokes confirmed he has already signed a two-year deal, as exclusively revealed by the Guardian last month. Last year, the first when the ECB offered multi-year contracts, he committed himself for just 12 months, rather than the three years he was offered, in the belief, in the words of the managing director of men’s cricket, Rob Key, that “when the contract cycle changes he will be in a stronger negotiating position”.
Carse’s debut comes against the same opponents he faced in his first international appearance, an ODI in Cardiff in 2021. He has played one first-class game, as well as two T20s and five ODIs, since returning from a three-month ban for gambling offences at the end of August.
Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett, Ollie Pope (capt), Joe Root, Harry Brook, Jamie Smith (wicketkeeper), Chris Woakes, Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse, Jack Leach, Shoaib Bashir.
“He’s a wicket-taker. You’ve seen it in white-ball cricket, you’ve seen it for Durham,” Joe Root said. “He’s got those balls in him that out of nowhere, on the flattest of wickets, can make something happen.
“That’s really exciting, when you’ve got someone like that within your squad that can potentially turn the game in a matter of moments, and he can bat as well. He offers a huge amount to the squad.”
In Stokes’s absence, the return of Zak Crawley is the only change to the top order that played the final Test of the summer at the Oval. Chris Woakes will bat at No 7 in his first away Test since the final series of Root’s captaincy, against West Indies in March 2022, and his first in Asia since December 2016.
Jack Leach returns to the side for what will be the seventh away Test in his last eight. He has failed to finish his last two Tests, having injured a knee in Hyderabad at the start of this year. He then suffered what were described as “low back symptoms”, revealed after scans to be a lumbar stress fracture, against Ireland at Lord’s last June.
He will play alongside his Somerset teammate Shoaib Bashir, who was preferred to him this summer.
