There was something particularly striking, and indeed particularly beautiful, about the moment it became clear, beyond even the bounds of sallow, sleepless, toast-crumbed, pyjama-clad, mid-morning existential delusion, that England’s cricketers were going to lose the final Test against Pakistan in Sharjah.

Ten minutes into the fifth day’s play Yasir Shah trapped Joe Root lbw playing back to his fourth ball of the day and England’s faint hopes of chasing down an unlikely target duly evaporated. It wasn’t so much the ball itself that stood out, a weird, skiddy full-pitched leg-break that rapped Root on the ankle as he jabbed his bat down, bent double in that familiar attitude of betrayal by the grubber, the look of a batsman who strode to the crease expecting a handshake and found himself kneed in the guts instead.

It wasn’t just the pedigree of those involved either: the world’s most brilliantly alluring overgrown cartoon mouse of a leg-spin bowler getting one through the No1-ranked batsman. It wasn’t even the reaction of the bowler who, like a few of Pakistan’s best cricketers, seems to spend quite a lot of time fighting back the urge to burst into laughter, whose cricket is essentially humorous in nature, a matter of misdirection and stump-shattering punchlines. Even the wicketkeeper Sarfraz Ahmed’s huge grinning appeal was basically a round of applause for an excellent, if slightly accidental piece of comedic timing.

Really, though, the best thing about Yasir’s dismissal of Root was the realisation that to refuse to celebrate it, to maintain that there was any level on which this was not a wonderful thing, would be absurd.

This wasn’t just a fine individual duel, but a moment of international sport in its pure form, a genuine clash of systems: on one side England, surely one of the most expensively micromanaged teams in cricket history; at the other the roving pirate ship, the unstyled outsider that is Pakistan cricket.

Root is a wonderful, lively player. But he is also arguably the most carefully groomed international cricketer England has ever produced, a batsman whose every significant innings from junior levels up is stored within the ECB digital archive, whose personal and technical qualities have been refined at every age level, a pure talent that has flowered from within a fiercely contained environment.

Yasir is a wilder flower, a boy who took up bowling aged 10 after seeing Shane Warne on TV and remains largely self-taught, a product of cousins and club and scratch cricket. He grew up in the beautiful but troubled north-west, a place of Taliban atrocities and military tension that has nonetheless become something of a centre for Pakistan domestic cricket in recent times. Yasir plays for Abbottabad, which you might also remember as the place Osama bin Laden was killed by US navy seals a few years back.

Meanwhile in a wider sense Pakistan remain more than ever cricket’s own uppity, brilliant, flawed outsiders, a nation that has fallen out with the governing nations pretty much from the moment it was called into being. Exiled, underpaid, excluded in any kind of cricket-against-the-enemy narrative, Pakistan emerge as underdogs. They are in a sense a kind of anti-England, a nation that has everything – talent, charisma, a vibrant public sporting life – except money and influence.

Here’s an odd thing, though. Pakistan are better at cricket than England right now. They’re ranked higher. In the conditions the majority of world cricket is actually played in they have more extreme, more effective players. They have a greater passion for the sport at home, a nation of 200m for whom cricket is a central strand in everyday life, as opposed to the lucrative but largely invisible sport it has become in England.

A ruling body with any real interest in the purity and good health of its sport would be plugged right into this priapic sense of passion, milking it for all it’s worth, smoothing the way for Pakistan, preserving this priceless energy. And yet the politics of money and influence dictate that Pakistan are instead squeezed to the margins. In the next few days the fate of India’s tour of UAE in the new year will be decided. Most likely it will be cancelled because of ideological pressures, unsurprisingly given there is probably as much chance of Pakistan and India having a nuclear war as there is them playing in each others’ backyards.

The upshot of which is that brilliant, passionate Pakistan don’t have a Test scheduled for eight months. Most likely they won’t make it to the ICC World T20 in India in the spring. England aside, New Zealand are the only other major nation in the diary for the next year. This despite the fact the ongoing carve-up between the Big Three governing bodies was sugared with the promise of a larger role, even the suggestion India-Pakistan series would be revived.

Not to mention the fact that rather than some dying, cold moon, Pakistan cricket still burns with feverish life – and also ambition. The first Pakistan Super League T20 is pencilled in for February, replacement for the Cool & Cool Presents Haier Super8 T20 Cup. The PSL will take place in the Emirates, but within the country too there is still a profound sense of sport as a distillation of the wider mass experience, a collection of unpasteurised players from the same world, same streets, same clubs, same fields as those who watch and follow them.

Hence the wonderful allure of a bowler such as Zulfiqar Babar, ageing country boy left-armer, or the two Peshawar seamers, Imran Khan, who was in this series, and Imran Khan (1), a late 20s left-armer from nowhere, with a handful of T20 games under his belt who is now fizzing away at the edge of the international cricket. Plus, of course, the indestructible Younis Khan, who looks these days like he’s been carved out of stone, some great grinning, backslapping cricketing warrior-god striding to the crease.

Hence also the temptation to wonder what exactly we would be cheering, were England to go to the Gulf and beat Pakistan? What would be the message here? Transform your team into a semi-detached blue lycra juggernaut. You still get to thrash the outsiders. Because make no mistake, when it comes to the struggle for cricket’s soul, its heavily monetised future, England are not the ewoks here. Whereas Pakistan cricket, for all its flaws and wonky structures, retains at least a breath of something gloriously pure and gloriously sporting.