History of Pakistan Cricket: 1954 to the Modern Game

No Test side has ever been harder to predict. Pakistan has beaten every country in the game, at home and away, often when nobody expected it, and lost to sides it had no business losing to, often in the same month. It produced the two best left-arm fast bowlers the sport has seen, a batsman who occupied the crease for longer than anyone before or since, the technique that changed how old balls are used, and a World Cup win built on a campaign that should have ended in the group stage. It has also spent long stretches unable to play at home, and its administration has changed hands more often than any comparable board's. All of that is one story, and it does not resolve into a tidy arc.

This page follows the national side from its first Test in October 1952 onward. How the game reached the cities that became Pakistan, what existed before partition and how the board and the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy were built are covered separately in our origin of cricket in Pakistan. The full set of national accounts sits in our cricket history index.

1952 to 1958: a new country wins in England

Pakistan's first Test was played at the Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi in October 1952, against India, under Abdul Hafeez Kardar. India won by an innings. Ten days later, at Lucknow, Pakistan won its second Test, also by an innings, with Fazal Mahmood taking twelve wickets in the match on matting. A country five years old had won a Test in its second attempt, against the side it had been partitioned from. India's account of the same fixture runs through our history of Indian cricket.

The tour that defined the early years came in 1954, when Pakistan visited England for the first time. The first three Tests produced two draws and a heavy defeat. At The Oval, on a damp August pitch, Fazal took six wickets in each innings and Pakistan won by twenty-four runs. No side had ever won a Test in England on its inaugural tour. The result was reported across the subcontinent as something closer to a national event than a cricket score, and it is still the single most-cited fact about Pakistani cricket's beginnings.

Fazal Mahmood and Hanif Mohammad

Fazal was a police officer who bowled fast-medium with a leg cutter, and for most of the 1950s he was the attack rather than part of it. He bowled long spells because there was nobody to relieve him, and the surfaces of the era, hard and low and often matting, suited exactly what he did.

Hanif Mohammad was the other half of the equation. In January 1958, at Bridgetown, with Pakistan following on more than 470 behind the West Indies, he batted for around sixteen hours and scored 337 to save the match. It remains the longest innings in first-class cricket by time. A year later, playing for Karachi against Bahawalpur, he was run out for 499, then the highest individual score in first-class cricket, a record that stood until Brian Lara passed it in 1994. Hanif was small, immaculate and almost impossible to dislodge, and he came from a family that supplied four Test cricketers.

Pakistan also began building a home record that became notorious. The National Stadium in Karachi opened in the mid-1950s and Pakistan did not lose a Test there for decades, a run of more than thirty matches that only ended when England won at the ground in December 2000.

The 1960s and 1970s: the classical era

The 1960s were quiet. Pakistan played little cricket, mostly drew what it played, and lost Kardar's generation without immediately replacing it. The revival came in the 1970s, and it produced the most technically admired Pakistani side of them all.

Mushtaq Mohammad, Hanif's younger brother, captained for much of the decade. Majid Khan opened with a bareheaded elegance that county crowds in England remembered for years afterwards. Zaheer Abbas, bespectacled and prolific, made double hundreds for Gloucestershire as a matter of routine and became the first player from Asia to reach a hundred first-class centuries. Asif Iqbal batted in the middle order and captained briefly. Intikhab Alam bowled leg-spin and later coached the side to its greatest success. Wasim Bari kept wicket for a decade and a half.

Two results anchor the period. In January 1977 at Sydney, Pakistan won a Test in Australia for the first time, with a young Imran Khan taking twelve wickets in the match. Two years later, in 1978-79, India toured Pakistan for the first time in seventeen years, and Pakistan won the series. The fixture had been suspended for reasons entirely outside cricket; its resumption made it, for the following decade, the most watched bilateral contest in the sport.

The bowler who found reverse swing

Sarfraz Nawaz opened the bowling through most of the 1970s and is generally credited with the technique that became Pakistan's signature. At Melbourne in 1979, chasing a modest target, Australia were comfortably placed and then lost their last seven wickets in a spell from Sarfraz that cost almost nothing. The ball was old. It was swinging the wrong way.

Reverse swing works because a ball maintained with one side heavily polished and the other allowed to roughen will, once it is worn enough and bowled fast enough, swing towards the shiny side rather than away from it. Pakistani grounds produced it naturally: abrasive outfields, dry pitches, low bounce and no lateral movement off the seam meant that a bowler who could not make an old ball do something had no way of taking a wicket after the twentieth over. The craft grew out of the conditions the country happened to have, and it spread from there to every attack in the world.

Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and the 1980s

Imran Khan took over the captaincy in 1982 and held it, with interruptions, for a decade. He had begun as a fast bowler of more enthusiasm than control and rebuilt himself into one of the four great all-rounders of his generation, finishing with more than 350 Test wickets and close to 4,000 Test runs. As a captain he was unusually direct about selection, backing young fast bowlers on instinct and defending them publicly afterwards.

His results changed what Pakistan expected. In 1986-87 Pakistan won a Test series in India for the first time, taking the deciding match at Bangalore on a turning pitch. The following summer, in England in 1987, Pakistan won a series in England for the first time, sealed by a large win at Headingley. Those two away series wins, in successive seasons, against the two hardest opponents to beat at home, are the foundation of Imran's reputation as a captain rather than as a player.

Miandad

Javed Miandad was the most complete batsman Pakistan has produced and the most abrasive. He scored 163 on Test debut against New Zealand as a nineteen-year-old, made 280 not out against India, and finished with more than 8,800 Test runs at an average above fifty. He captained the side at various points, was removed at various points, and returned repeatedly.

He is best remembered in the subcontinent for one ball. In the Austral-Asia Cup final at Sharjah in April 1986, Pakistan needed four from the last delivery against India, and Miandad hit Chetan Sharma over midwicket for six. Sharjah in the 1980s was a strange and important venue: neutral ground, expatriate crowds, one-day tournaments outside the ICC calendar, and enormous television audiences in both India and Pakistan. It normalised the idea of subcontinental cricket played at a neutral venue for a paying audience, which mattered a great deal later.

The spin tradition

While the fast bowlers took the headlines, Pakistan sustained a wrist-spin culture that no other country matched for continuity. Abdul Qadir kept leg-spin alive through the 1980s, a decade when most sides had abandoned it entirely, bowling with a whirling approach and a full set of variations; his nine wickets in an innings against England at Lahore in 1987 is the best return by a Pakistani bowler. Mushtaq Ahmed followed him and became a central figure in the 1992 World Cup and later a prolific county bowler at Sussex.

Then came Saqlain Mushtaq, an off-spinner who developed a delivery that turned away from the right-hander out of an apparently orthodox action. The doosra changed off-spin permanently, and it also opened three decades of argument about bowling actions and elbow tolerances. Danish Kaneria, Saeed Ajmal and Yasir Shah continued the line; Yasir reached two hundred Test wickets in fewer matches than any bowler since the 1930s. Our explainer on types of spin bowling sets out the mechanics behind each of these.

1992: the World Cup

Pakistan's 1992 campaign in Australia and New Zealand began badly enough that it should have been over by the halfway point. The side lost to India, lost to South Africa and were bowled out for 74 against England at Adelaide, only for rain to end the match and hand Pakistan a point it had done nothing to earn. That point was the margin of qualification.

What followed was a transformation. Pakistan won its remaining group matches, beat New Zealand in the semi-final at Auckland with Inzamam-ul-Haq scoring 60 from 37 balls at a stage when the chase looked beyond reach, and met England in the final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on 25 March 1992. Imran and Miandad rebuilt a shaky innings slowly, the tail accelerated, and Pakistan set 249. England were 141 for four and going well when Wasim Akram bowled two deliveries in consecutive balls that removed Allan Lamb and Chris Lewis. England were bowled out for 227.

Imran retired shortly afterwards, having spent much of the tournament telling his players to fight like cornered tigers, a phrase that has followed the squad ever since. The broader tournament story, including the innovations of the 1992 format, is covered in our World Cup history.

Wasim, Waqar and the 1990s

Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis bowled together for roughly a decade and are the most destructive new-ball and old-ball pairing the game has had. Wasim was left-arm, quick, and capable of swinging the ball both ways off an approach of a dozen paces; he took 414 Test wickets and was the first bowler to reach five hundred in one-day internationals. Waqar was faster still, bowled full and straight, and specialised in the reverse-swinging yorker that broke feet and stumps in roughly equal measure; he finished with more than 370 Test wickets.

Around them the 1990s side was volatile. Saeed Anwar opened the batting with a left-hander's timing and made a one-day score that stood as the world record for years. Inzamam settled into the middle order and became, for a long period, Pakistan's leading Test run-scorer. Moin Khan kept wicket and finished innings. Pakistan won a Test series in England in 1992 and one in the West Indies era of decline later, but it also lost matches it dominated and changed captains constantly.

The decade ended with the 1999 World Cup, where Pakistan reached the final at Lord's, were bowled out for 132 and lost inside the day to Australia. The performance was so far below the side's level that it fed a suspicion the sport was about to confront directly.

The corruption cases, stated plainly

Pakistani cricket has been the subject of two major documented corruption inquiries and several smaller ones. What follows is what the records establish.

In 1998 the Pakistani government appointed Justice Malik Muhammad Qayyum to inquire into allegations of match-fixing. His report, published in 2000, recommended a life ban for Salim Malik and for Ata-ur-Rehman, and fines for a number of other players including Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed and Saeed Anwar, none of whom were found to have fixed matches. The report also recommended that Wasim not be considered for the captaincy. Malik's life ban was subsequently set aside following a legal challenge in Pakistan.

In August 2010, during the Lord's Test against England, a newspaper investigation recorded an agent arranging for deliberate no-balls to be bowled at pre-arranged points in the match. The ICC charged and banned three players: captain Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and the eighteen-year-old Mohammad Amir. All three were later prosecuted in an English criminal court, convicted and given custodial sentences in November 2011. Amir served his ban, completed a rehabilitation process and returned to the Pakistan side in 2016.

There have been further cases. Danish Kaneria was banned for life by the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2012 in connection with spot-fixing in county cricket. Several players received bans following corruption investigations around the Pakistan Super League in 2017. Each of these is a matter of published findings rather than rumour, and each is stated here for that reason.

2009: the Lahore attack and a decade in exile

On 3 March 2009, gunmen attacked the Sri Lanka team bus as it approached the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore for the third day of the second Test. Six Pakistani police officers and two civilians were killed. Several Sri Lankan players and support staff were injured. The match was abandoned and the tour ended immediately.

The consequences for Pakistani cricket were total and lasted a decade. International sides stopped touring. Pakistan was removed as a co-host of the 2011 World Cup. The national team, which still had a full fixture list to fulfil, relocated its home matches to the United Arab Emirates, playing at Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah for roughly ten years.

That period is easy to summarise as a loss and harder to summarise fairly. Pakistan played some of its best Test cricket in the UAE. Misbah-ul-Haq took over the Test captaincy in the aftermath of the 2010 scandal, when the side was closer to collapse than at any point in its history, and led it for six years with a calm that had not previously been a Pakistani characteristic. Under him Pakistan whitewashed England three-nil in the UAE in 2011-12, and in August 2016, after a drawn series in England, reached the top of the ICC Test rankings for the first time. Younis Khan, Misbah's long-time partner in the middle order, became the first Pakistani to score ten thousand Test runs. Both retired in 2017 after Pakistan won a Test series in the West Indies for the first time.

The cost was structural rather than sporting. A generation of Pakistani children never saw an international match. The board lost gate revenue and had to pay to stage its own home fixtures abroad. Crowds in the UAE were small, and the atmosphere at a Pakistan home Test in Abu Dhabi was not remotely the atmosphere of one in Karachi.

The short formats, and 2017

Pakistan reached the final of the inaugural World Twenty20 in 2007 and lost to India. Two years later, at Lord's in June 2009, it won the tournament, beating Sri Lanka in the final with Younis Khan as captain and Shahid Afridi taking the man-of-the-match award for an all-round performance. Afridi's international career was long, wildly inconsistent and enormously popular; our own IPL records, which cover only his single season in the competition in 2008, show nine wickets in ten matches and a strike rate of 176 with the bat, which is a fair miniature of the whole.

The 2017 Champions Trophy in England produced the most improbable result of the modern era. Pakistan qualified as the lowest-ranked side in the tournament and lost its opening match to India by a very large margin. It then beat South Africa, Sri Lanka and England, and met India again in the final at The Oval. Fakhar Zaman made a century, Pakistan posted 338, and India were bowled out for 158. Sarfaraz Ahmed captained. The margin, 180 runs, is the largest in a major ICC final.

Pakistan reached the T20 World Cup final again in 2022 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, thirty years after 1992 and at the same venue, and lost to England.

The PSL and the return of cricket to Pakistan

The Pakistan Super League launched in 2016, initially played entirely in the UAE, with franchises representing Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta and later Multan. Islamabad United won the first edition. The league mattered for two reasons beyond entertainment. It gave Pakistani domestic cricketers a professional, televised, high-pressure competition of a kind the country had never had, and it became the mechanism for bringing international cricket home.

The sequence was deliberate and slow. Zimbabwe toured in 2015, the first full international side to visit since the attack. The PSL final was staged in Lahore in 2017 under extraordinary security. A World XI played a three-match series in Lahore later that year, followed by Sri Lanka for a Twenty20, then the West Indies in 2018. In December 2019 Sri Lanka played a Test at Rawalpindi, the first Test match in Pakistan for a decade. Bangladesh followed in 2020.

Progress was not linear. New Zealand abandoned a tour on the day of the first match in September 2021 over a security assessment, and England postponed its own visit days later. England did tour in December 2022, playing a Test series in Pakistan for the first time since 2005, and won it. In 2025 Pakistan staged the Champions Trophy, its first ICC event as host since 1996, under a hybrid arrangement that placed India's matches in Dubai.

Foreign players in the PSL have made the league a familiar part of the global franchise circuit, in the way that the Indian Premier League and Australia's Big Bash League already were. Pakistani players themselves have been absent from the IPL since the first season in 2008, following the suspension of bilateral cricket between the two countries.

Administration, and why it keeps changing

One feature of Pakistani cricket requires stating without embellishment: the governing body changes leadership constantly. The chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board is appointed through a process in which the country's head of government serves as patron, which ties cricket administration to the political cycle more tightly than in most Test nations. Chairmen, selection committees, head coaches and captains have turned over at a rate that would be considered a crisis elsewhere and is treated in Pakistan as ordinary weather.

The domestic structure has been rebuilt more than once on the same logic. A major restructure in 2019 removed the long-standing department teams, funded by banks, airlines and other employers, in favour of a small number of provincial sides; the change was contested by players who lost their livelihoods and was subsequently revisited. That argument is roughly as old as the board itself.

The talent has kept arriving regardless, which is the strongest argument that the production of Pakistani cricketers has never depended much on the system above it. Babar Azam emerged as a batsman of orthodox technique and heavy scoring across formats; Shaheen Afridi as a left-arm fast bowler in the direct line of Wasim, swinging the new ball in at pace. Mohammad Rizwan established himself as a wicketkeeper-batsman of unusual stamina. The fast bowlers keep coming, from tape-ball cricket and club grounds and, occasionally, from nowhere identifiable at all.

The women's game

Pakistan's women's team played its first internationals in the late 1990s, in the face of considerable opposition, and the sisters Shaiza and Sharmeen Khan were central to establishing it. The side won gold at the Asian Games in both 2010 and 2014, has qualified for World Cups, and now operates under central contracts and a domestic structure administered by the PCB. Progress has been slower than in Australia or England, and the base of participation remains small.

Pakistan's landmarks

Landmark	When
First Test match	October 1952, at Delhi
First Test win	October 1952, at Lucknow
First Test win in England	1954, at The Oval
Hanif Mohammad's 337	1958, at Bridgetown
First Test win in Australia	1976-77, at Sydney
First Test series win in India	1986-87
First Test series win in England	1987
World Cup	1992, at Melbourne
World Twenty20	2009, at Lord's
Top of the Test rankings	2016
Champions Trophy	2017, at The Oval

What the record adds up to

Pakistan has produced fast bowlers in a quantity and quality that only the West Indies of the 1980s can match, and it has done so continuously, from Fazal Mahmood through Sarfraz and Imran to Wasim, Waqar and their successors. It has sustained a wrist-spin tradition across seventy years while most countries abandoned and rediscovered theirs. It won a World Cup from a position of near-elimination, spent a decade playing home matches two thousand kilometres from home, brought international cricket back, and did all of this while its administration reorganised itself roughly every other year.

The comparison is instructive. England's cricket grew out of continuous institutional stability, and Australia's out of a domestic competition that has never seriously been interrupted. Pakistan's has been interrupted almost constantly and has kept producing anyway. The nearest parallel in the modern game is the country next door but one, whose players learned the game in Pakistani refugee camps and whose own story is told in our history of Afghanistan cricket.

Career records for the Pakistani cricketers who appear in the competitions we track are on our player pages, and our cricket quiz has a good deal to say about 1992.