Double Headers

117 Pakistan - Last home of the double-header Test players Hanif and Wazir Mohammad, Alimuddin, Waqar Hasan and Mahmood Hussain, while the Blues’ biggest names were the rather less distinguished Test duo of Maqsood Ahmed and Ikram Elahi. In later years, future Test cricketers Liaqat Ali and Saleem Jaffar were among those gaining their first first-class experience with the Karachi Greens. But as the 1956/57 example illustrates, not all the best players went into the Whites squad; so even then, there appears to have been some attempt to mix and match the players, but maybe with some aim of producing a Whites side which was first among equals. This contention works less well for Lahore, where if anything the Blues were generally stronger than the Whites. And frankly I have no way of assessing the relative merits of the colour sides from other provinces or departments – Rawalpindi Greens against Rawalpindi Yellows in 1964/65 for example, or Railways Greens against Railways Reds in the following season. But barring any firm evidence to the contrary, I am happy to go along with Abid Ali Kazi’s statement that the squads, in recent times at least, have been selected in the hope of producing roughly evenly-matched sides. We’ll look shortly at how this has worked out in practice. The second difference from the arrangement in South Africa is that in Pakistan there has never been any absolute restriction on two sides from the same organisation meeting each other in a first-class match. True, in some tournaments played in whole or in part on a knock-out basis, or played in mini-groups before the group winners came together for a concluding series of knock-out games 97 , sides from the same organisation were often deliberately kept apart in the earlier stages; but if their results required them to play each other in a knock-out game, then that is what happened. In total there have been 40 instances of such ‘internal’ first- class matches in Pakistan to the end of the 2012/13 season. Double-heading With somany instances of organisations doubling indomestic competitions, occasions when two or more sides from the same organisation were playing simultaneous first-class matches were inevitable, and frequent. The first Pakistani double-header began on 28 December 1956, when Karachi Greens and Karachi Whites opposed each other at the Karachi Parsi Institute Ground. The first instance not involving an ‘internal’ match came a week later on 4 January 1957, when Karachi Blues met Punjab A at Lahore at the same time as Karachi Whites were playing Sind at Hyderabad. Since then, to the end of the 2012/13 season there have been over 360 further instances, as summarised in the following table. The left-hand column includes all the organisations which have, at one time or another, had two teams in the same competition, even though – as the table reveals – not all of them have been involved in double-headers: ‘Internal’ matches Other double- headers Total Seasons of first and last/most recent East Pakistan 2 0 2 1956/57 – 1957/58 Hyderabad 0 0 0 -- 97 As was the case with some of the more ephemeral first-class competitions and even, for some years until the late 1980s, with the QeA.