Jos Buttler and England aware of debt to Pakistan on first tour since 2005

Jos Buttler does not recall much about England’s last trip to Pakistan. It was in 2005 and he was a teenager playing for Somerset Under-15s. He could tell you plenty about England’s win in the Ashes that summer – “probably the best series ever” – but he knows only fragments of the tour that followed it.

There are highlight-package snatches of Mohammad Yousuf’s implacable batting, Danish Kaneria’s sly grin as he schemed over his next delivery, and Shoaib Akhtar’s fringe flapping like a crow’s wings as he celebrated defeating another of England’s batsmen who, hapless and baffled, collapsed twice as they lost the Test series two-nil.

“I think I remember watching the Sports Personality of the Year awards that year,” Buttler says, “and I feel like, did the team get the award and they were all sat out here lined up?” They did. They stayed up till 3am to appear live on video link and paid for it the next day when they were ripped apart by Akhtar again in a one-day game England lost by seven wickets.

It has been 17 years since that tour. For six of those, immediately after the terror attack on the Sri Lanka team in March 2009, there was no international cricket played in Pakistan at all. There is a group of players who passed their entire time in international cricket without ever playing a game in front of their own home crowds. The careers of the fast bowler Tanvir Ahmed, wicketkeeper Adnan Akmal and spinner Zulfiqar Babar began after the exile and ended before it did. And there is a generation of fans who for six years saw their team play only on television in empty stadiums in the United Arab Emirates.

It is true, too, but less often said, that there is a generation of English players, such as Buttler, who have never had the