Nothing but pride to play for

The lunchtime interval on the fourth day at Lahore was extended to accommodate Friday prayers, but it wasn't entirely clear which side was doing the praying. At 5 for 1 after a solitary over of their final innings of the tour, England's cricketers were all too happy to delay the inevitable by a further 20 minutes.

The first session today could only be described as chastising. A beaten side were treated like rag-dolls by a succession of slap-happy opponents, who found ever more extraordinary methods of adding to their total. Kamran Akmal produced a tennis serve to put Steve Harmison away in front of square, before laying into Andrew Flintoff, of whom nothing more could have been asked in a seismic year of performances. Trundling in at 80mph, and grazing away at fine leg between overs, Freddie's demeanour was the team morale writ large.

You know that something dramatic has come to pass when it is no longer in a team's interests to take a wicket. England's biggest error of the morning came when Michael Vaughan underarmed onto the stumps to run Inzamam-ul-Haq out for 97. Joy at denying their nemesis a third consecutive hundred was immediately tempered by the realisation that they now had a single tricky over to negotiate before lunch. Sure enough, Trescothick failed to do so.

England should yet be able to save the game. The pitch is placid and the daylight hours are fading, although Trescothick's demise is hardly an encouraging omen. Last winter, he fell second-ball to Shaun Pollock at Cape Town to precipitate their biggest shoeing of the year 2005, and the winter before that, it was his sixth-ball dismissal - again for a duck - that opened the floodgates for England's innings-and-215-run defeat in Colombo. So far, this match is developing along ominously familiar lines.

And yet there is cause for some cheer - and not just that being provided by the relentlessly upbeat Barmy Armyites in the Raja's enclosure. By the close, Ian Bell and Paul Collingwood were doing their damnedest to dig England out of a hole, having added 91 for the third wicket. There is nothing but pride for England to play for, but at least the two current incumbents have plenty pride to salvage.

Both have taken considerable strides towards redemption on this tour, with Bell's century at Faisalabad and Collingwood's 96 in the first innings here. But, of England's middle order, it is these two who have the extra incentive to save the game. For Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, the dashers at No. 5 and 6, the glory days of 2005 have been and gone, with Flintoff's impending coronation as Sports Personality of the Year a testament to that.

Bell and Collingwood, on the other hand, were the nearly men of the Ashes campaign - one played all five Tests and might have wished he hadn't; the other played just the one, and must have blinked with disbelief when the call finally came. At the start of this tour, it was a straight fight for the right to a solitary slot; now, in a neatly ironic twist, the two are fighting side by side to salvage something from a lost cause.

Bell, in particular, has the wherewithal to bat all day long. He has shown a tendency, at this early stage of his career, to get blown away in the heat of the moment, but he also has an unsatiable appetite for runs, and an uncanny eye for the path of least resistance. He took good advantage of two sluggish tracks at Multan and Faisalabad, but on each occasion he was distraught at departing the crease before he had milked every last single.

Collingwood was distraught for entirely different reasons in the first innings. He gave it away with a maiden Test century there for the taking, but resumes tomorrow morning on 37 not out, with a second opportunity begging to be taken. Well, England are begging him to take it, at any rate. If he doesn't, and neither does Bell, then a 2-0 trouncing may not be far behind.