For all the damnation and disappointment sparked by the inevitability of the result, there was something fitting about last week’s first Test between Pakistan and Australia ending in a draw. This, after all, is the spiritual home of stalemate: though only 32% of the 2,345 Tests in history have been drawn, in the first half-century of Test cricket in Pakistan 51% of all matches ended without a winner (65 of 128).
Between October 1961 and March 1984 England played out 11 successive draws there, including three of the five all-drawn series Pakistan hosted in that time. Fully 69% of all Tests played in Pakistan in the 1960s were drawn, followed by 71% in the 1970s and 56% in the 1980s. Returning to the country for the first time in 24 years Australia picked up where they had left off, with a seventh draw in their last nine matches there going back to 1988.
