Double Headers

112 7: Pakistan - Last home of the double-header The complicated background When the state of Pakistan was created in 1947, three of the teams that had been competing in India’s Ranji Trophy found themselves in the new country – Sind (based at Karachi), Northern India (based at Lahore), and North West Frontier Province (NWFP, based at Peshawar). Lahore and Karachi were already established as the main cricketing centres in the new country, the former having already hosted 38 first-class matches and the latter 21. Only four cities in All-India had hosted more first-class matches by this date than Lahore (Bombay 168, Madras 62, Poona 55 and Calcutta 43), while Karachi was ninth on the list (behind also Delhi, Secunderabad and Patiala). The pattern continued in the early days of cricket in Pakistan, where 16 of the first 19 first-class matches, to 1952/53 inclusive, were played at either Karachi or Lahore. 91 When the first domestic first-class competition, the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy (hereafter ‘QeA’), was set up in 1953/54, seven teams participated, comprising five geographically based sides (Punjab [successors to Northern India], Sind, NWFP, and two more recently- established sides from Karachi and Bahawalpur) and two from national organisations (Railways and Combined Services). East Pakistan and Baluchistan also entered the QeA in 1953/54 but withdrew before the competition started; they both participated in the tournament’s second season, in 1954/55. Bahawalpur and Karachi were the first two winners of the QeA, but these first two seasons showed up the widely divergent strengths of the competing sides. To address this, for the next holding of the competition in 1956/57, Karachi and Punjab were each allowed to enter three teams. The continuing focus of the game on Karachi and Lahore was thus still in evidence. The three teams from Punjab were distinguished by letters (they were known as Punjab, Punjab A and Punjab B), but those from Karachi adopted the later-customary pattern of distinguishing the sides by using colour-names, being known as Karachi Blues, Karachi Greens and Karachi Whites. Although cricket in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was weak by comparison with that in the west, East Pakistan also entered two teams in the QeA for 1956/57, and they followed the Karachi pattern by being named Greens and Whites. So began an arrangement that has continued in Pakistan to the present day, whereby the stronger geographically-based sides – and on occasion, the stronger departmental (company) sides too – have been allowed to enter more than one team in particular domestic competitions. The provinces and departments [from here on I use the word ‘organisations’ to cover provinces and departments collectively] that have taken advantage of this arrangement are as follows. 91 The others were one each at Bahawalpur, Rawalpindi and Sialkot