England v Pakistan: third Twenty20 – live!

12th over: Pakistan 104-2 (Haider 52, Hafeez 30) Hafeez finds Gregory a little harder to judge than Rashid, and throws his bat around a bit without timing anything. He gets a single, though, and Haider Ali pulls through midwicket for the boundary that brings up his half-century, off 28 balls. He is the first Pakistan batsman to score a half-century on his T20 debut, I’m told, and has got Sky’s Rob Key absolutely purring.

11th over: Pakistan 100-2 (Haider 45, Hafeez 29) Hafeez is hit in the pad, but only Bairstow bothers to appeal and a review is swiftly ruled out, which is just as well as the ball pitched just outside the line. Small margins, but big implications: a couple of balls later Hafeez thrashes one over midwicket for six, and then the next goes in the same direction but a little further! So far in fact that Mulan has to undertake something of a stadium tour to retrieve it.

10th over: Pakistan 84-2 (Haider 44, Hafeez 16) Haider lifts the ball towards cow corner, where Sam Billings is lurking. He comes in to snaffle the catch, realises he’s made a terrible mistake, backpedals wildly, launches himself into the air, and watches the ball sail over his outstretched hand, bounce once and clear the rope. This is sufficiently tough on Gregory, the poor bowler, that the umpires let him get away with a bouncer that flies miles away from Mo Hafeez and really should be called a wide.

9th over: Pakistan 77-2 (Haider 39, Hafeez 14) Time for Rashid, who is milked for a series of ones and twos and eventually a four, awarded after extended recourse to replays after Gregory’s valiant attempt to cut it off before it hit the rope was adjudged to have occurred after his own knee did so.

8th over: Pakistan 66-2 (Haider 32, Hafeez 9) Lewis Gregory comes on, and Haider sends his first delivery into the middle of next week, smashing it over midwicket, over deep midwicket, over even deeper midwicket and into the deepest and murkiest depths of really quite profound midwicket, which is somewhere out towards the car park. He is exceeding some pretty high expectations at the moment.

7th over: Pakistan 54-2 (Haider 24, Hafeez 7) Curran’s deliveries range in speed from 69mph to 85mph (well, there was one slow ball). It keeps the batsmen on their toes, though Hafeez pulls one over midwicket, an extremely handsome shot even if the ball landed six inches short of the rope.

6th over: Pakistan 47-2 (Haider 22, Hafeez 2) Haider tries to flog Jordan through midwicket, gets it wrong, and bottom-edges just past his stumps. He still gets four runs, mind, as he does by pulling the next to long leg. Ten off the last powerplay over.

5th over: Pakistan 37-2 (Haider 13, Hafeez 1) Good stuff from Tom Curran, who starts with a yorker, gets some help from the seam to dismiss Babar and throws in a slow bouncer. Then Haider Ali picks up a delivery that was only just short of yorker length and lifts it over midwicket for a lovely, last-ball four.

Tom Curran gets one to skid on and take out middle and off stumps, and Babar Azam is out for an 18-ball 21!

4th over: Pakistan 32-1 (Babar 21, Haider 9) Jordan replaces Moeen. I have a particular soft spot for Jordan, since I phoned him one afternoon for a chat about something or other and it turned out he was in New Zealand, it was the middle of the night, and he was fast asleep. Somehow he failed to hold it against me, which shows a particularly forgiving nature. Anyway, a good first over from him here, five off it. Babar has faced the last 13 balls and will also face the next.

3rd over: Pakistan 27-1 (Babar 17, Haider 9) Three fours on the spin for Babar, one straight, the next through midwicket, and the third touched very fine beyond third man. The third shot was particularly lovely, but he gets a bit much on an attempt to repeat it and it goes to the fielder. Still, 15 off the over.

2nd over: Pakistan 12-1 (Babar 2, Haider 8) Haider Ali comes in, hits his first delivery for one and then smears his second over long-on for a huge six!

Fakhar Zaman’s hapless and very brief innings comes to an end as he completely misjudges Moeen’s first delivery and loses a couple of stumps!

1st over: Pakistan 2-0 (Babar 1, Fakhar 1) A fine opening over, which could have been better rewarded. Babar takes three balls to get off the mark, and then Fakhar very nearly chops his first ball into his stumps only for it to bounce wide of leg, and gets a leading edge to the second, which floats wide of the bowler. “If it really is dry (for Manchester) then we can expect to see wickets falling only when the batsmen make their own mistakes, rather than being winkled out,” suggests John Starbuck. “Not much of a prospect for the bowlers, so any successes ought to be worth double.”

The players are out! Saqib Mahmood has the ball in his hands. Let’s rock!

Babar Azam admits that he too would have chosen to bowl. Pakistan make three changes, with Haider Ali, a big-hitting 19-year-old debutant, the wicketkeeper Sarfaraz Ahmed and Wahab Riaz coming in.

“It looks a little bit drier than the first game that we played but it still looks good,” declares Eoin Morgan, who picks an unchanged side. “There is no hiding place in T20 cricket, it can be brutal.”

Hello world!

After three Tests and two T20s, one rained out, Pakistan go into the last match of their tour in search of a first win, while Babar Azam – officially the world’s top-ranked T20 batsman, mind you – comes to terms with being described as “a lost cow” by Shoaib Akhtar in the wake of the record-bending defeat to England on Sunday. “He is out there, not knowing what to do,” blasted Akhtar of his compatriot’s captaincy in that game, which may well fire up the 25-year-old, unless of course he’s ignored it completely as the wild flailings of an ex-player desperate to drive traffic to his YouTube channel.

England meanwhile have the first game of a new series against Australia to look forward to on Friday and will look to go into it without a hangover either literal (it’s Dawid Malan’s 33^rd birthday on Thursday, after all) or metaphorical. The birthday boy, who averages 54.60 across his 12 international ODI innings so far, is one of the players hoping to cement his place in the team with a big knock tonight.

There is a 2% chance of precipitation in Manchester this evening, while anything even tiptoeing towards the neighbourhood of vaguely approaching Sunday’s wild pyrotechnics (394 runs in 39.1 overs at 1.68 runs a ball) will do very nicely, thankyou.

Anyway, and most importantly, hello everybody, and welcome!