Reporting snapshot · 14 November 2026 (Asia/Karachi). The match is over and the result is unlikely to change, but the innings figures below are the ones carried by the published match accounts rather than a full official scorecard, and the championship table will move again when the second Test is played from 17 November.
Pakistan and Sri Lanka drew the first Test at Rawalpindi on Friday, 13 November, with Saud Shakeel’s 97 and Pakistan’s second-innings total of 284 for 8 leaving Sri Lanka 285 runs short of a win. Radio Pakistan gave the final scores — Pakistan 434 for 9 declared and 284 for 8, Sri Lanka 446 — while the International Cricket Council’s report of the match recorded that Sri Lanka did not get to bat in the second innings. About 25 minutes into the last session, The Express Tribune reported, the players shook hands and the opening Test of the World Test Championship series ended level.
It is the end of the Test KhabarWire followed on 12 November, when the debutant fast bowler Saqib Khan took seven for 130 to bowl Sri Lanka out for 446 and hand Pakistan a 12-run first-innings lead. A lead of that size was never going to settle a five-day match on a surface that had already produced 434 for nine in Pakistan’s first innings. It produced a draw instead. KhabarWire is following the campaign in its Pakistan Cricket hub.
Shakeel’s 97, and the stand that held
Pakistan resumed the fifth day on 57 for 1, 45 runs ahead on aggregate, and lost both of their overnight batters without adding to their scores: Lahiru Kumara dismissed Azan Awais and Asitha Fernando removed Mohammad Taha, the ICC reported. Babar Azam followed, making 34 from 48 balls with six fours before Milan Rathnayaka took him, and Agha Salman was caught for 13. Arafat Minhas added 16 from 29 balls.
The resistance came from Shakeel and Ghazi Ghori, who put on 92 for the sixth wicket. Ghori made 35 from 69 deliveries with three fours before falling to Rathnayaka, who finished with three wickets for 47 runs, with Kumara taking two for 65 and Fernando two for 35.
Shakeel, who had top-scored in Pakistan’s first innings with 93, faced 210 balls and struck seven fours before Kumara had him bowled for 97. The dismissal ended the match: the ICC’s report said his resistance ended “just three runs short of the milestone”, and the Express Tribune said the players shook hands as soon as he was gone. He finishes with two consecutive scores in the nineties in the same Test, and the century he would have reached remains the one he does not have.
Pakistan’s head coach Mike Hesson was sanguine about the whole five days. The Express Tribune reported him saying he was “very satisfied with the performance of the team”, and singling out the debutants, the half-century Arafat Minhas made on debut and Saqib Khan’s seven wickets. On Shakeel’s 97 he said that if someone had a problem with scores in the nineties, he would take that over a problem with scores in the teens.
A flat pitch and 1,164 runs
The three innings produced 1,164 runs in all. Pakistan’s first innings ended at 434 for 9 declared, with Minhas among five batters who reached a half-century, and Sri Lanka answered with 446 on centuries from Dhananjaya de Silva, who made 167, and Kusal Mendis, who made 119, the ICC’s report records. Mendis and de Silva had shared a 249-run stand for the fifth wicket, the longest Sri Lanka have made against Pakistan, as KhabarWire reported on the fourth day.
The surface had offered little by the third day, when the ICC assessed that neither attack had found much to work with, and it was the same surface on the last morning. The only passage that changed an innings was Saqib Khan’s, and the ICC named him player of the match.
What the draw leaves in the standings
The result reaches further than the scorecard. The ICC’s review of the World Test Championship puts Pakistan at the bottom of the table after ten Tests, two wins and a points percentage of 7.5, with three Tests left in the cycle — one against Sri Lanka and two against New Zealand. Sri Lanka sit seventh on 33.33 points percentage, having won one of seven. The ICC said the draw “gives both teams valuable points”, while noting that Pakistan “will rue missing out on a victory”.
The gap is not the work of one draw. The same review records that Pakistan lost the series in England 3-0, and that 11 points were docked from their tally for a slow over-rate at Edgbaston. Babar Azam is the leading run-scorer for Pakistan in this cycle with 620 runs, and Mohammad Abbas the leading wicket-taker with 33, but neither has lifted the side out of the bottom place.
The same ground again from 17 November
The second Test is at the same venue on 17 November and runs to 21 November, the ICC’s series schedule records, after the fixture was moved from the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore because of smog over Punjab. Rawalpindi will stage both Tests, and with the series scoreless the second one will decide it.
Pakistan’s own age-group side is meanwhile in Oman for the final of the Under-19 Asia Cup against India on Saturday, Radio Pakistan reported, after the semi-final win over Bangladesh.
