It might have appeared a crushingly familiar tale - one whose very repetition must feel like self-plagiarism by now.
An early wicket is not exactly rare for Pakistan; they average 23.03 for the opening stand since the start of 2024, lower than any team bar Ireland.
That another implosion would follow a promising partnership was also, perhaps, to be expected for this Pakistan side; they have now gone 16 innings without adding 100 runs after losing half their side. This one was particularly acute, plunging Pakistan from 117 for 3 to 171, losing their final seven wickets for 54 runs.
In some ways, though, what served up across a destructive afternoon session in Headingley was unique in recent times. Their batting troubles have primarily afflicted them in their second innings, when they have been unable to overcome a combination of deteriorating surfaces and mental fragility. Here, it wasn't yet 50 overs into the first day that Pakistan's first innings folded. For all of the current Pakistan side's batting woes, it is their lowest first-innings score in a Test since 2016, and the only time they have failed to breach 200 this decade.
The build-up to this Test was dominated by speculation about Babar Azam's involvement, but even his absence doesn't quite exonerate Pakistan. His stand-in, Salman Agha, had lost the toss and been put in to bat. He had then, with puzzling confidence, stood next to Joe Root, a man who knows this ground and these conditions perhaps better than anyone in world cricket, and declared he would have batted first anyway. It is what Pakistan wanted to do.
And for a while, Abdullah Shafique and Imam-ul-Haq made it make sense. A morning shower disrupted England's momentum, and the ground was washed in warm yellow sunlight through the early afternoon. Ollie Robinson's replacement bowlers weren't quite as clinical, and Pakistan's scoring rate ticked upwards.
Much of this build-up has framed Pakistan's best chances of being competitive this series in terms of how ordinary England are, but that partnership, and Pakistan's position of control, was being built very much on the visitors' own terms.
Not that this was an especially giddy position for Pakistan to get into. Their last two first innings saw them score 333 and 378 against South Africa, and even in what have been historically difficult places, this Pakistan side had possessed the ability to put runs on the board.
On their most recent tour of Australia, they put on 313 in Sydney and 264 in Melbourne. It didn't win them either game, but even in their current state, Pakistan's batters do not lose games up front. This looked something of a continuation of that trend.
There was no warning before the landslide, no screeching animals flying away in unison, no shaking of the ground or deathly stillness. Amid the familiar murmur of a Leeds crowd that had settled into a lazy afternoon, going through the classic hits of the Barmy Army and some new ones like a particularly pedestrian version of Wonderwall, Pakistan found a trigger for panic where none looked to exist.
Josh Tongue landed one on seventh stump - not as part of any grand plan, but because he'd made a sluggish start. Until that delivery, not one he had bowled was on track to hit the stumps, and this one certainly wasn't.
But Imam, who had been judicious about leaving the ball, found a reason to go searching for this one. The result was an entirely familiar dismissal - a casual slashed drive, an edge to the slips, a comfortable catch. And it produced an entirely familiar chain of events; one by one, Pakistan's batters resembled more a sieve than a sponge when it came to dealing with pressure.
A dejected Shafique, who fell soon after, appeared to acknowledge the team was aware of the problem without being aware of a clear fix. "As a team, we talk about where we're having problems as a batting unit," he said. "But you don't get sudden results. Everyone discusses and analyses what's going wrong. We all want to fix this quickly but it can't always produce immediate results. It takes time."
Perhaps Pakistan's poor form over the past three years had lulled them into believing they arrived into this series rock-bottom. But as Pakistan's batters collapsed in on themselves on a strangely benign day at Headingley came the latest depressing reminder from this side: just because things are bad does not mean they can't get worse.
Pakistan's first innings wasn't among their more pressing problems through this ostensible nadir - now, it is what might have lost them the first Test before tea on day one had been called.
The last time Pakistan did crumble on the first day in similar vein came eight years ago. It was at this venue that England shot them out for 174. While Pakistan's Test side has been creating fresh, unwanted history for some time, they were, perhaps, by one very narrow definition, merely repeating it.