Double Headers

119 Pakistan - Last home of the double-header final, by a margin of just 18 runs. This time the Blues had five Test cricketers against the Whites’ eight. There was some correspondence between, on the one hand, the former A team and the Whites, and on the other, the former B team and the Blues. But this did not prevent a very different outcome from the teams’ meeting of the previous year. •The first two meetings of teams from Lahore were also in finals – namely, the finals of the Punjab Tournaments of 1973/74 and 1974/75. In the former, Lahore Greens beat Lahore Blues by an innings and 91 runs, although the Blues had more past or future Test players in their ranks (three against two). In 1974/75 the rivals had become Lahore A and Lahore B, with the A team winning on first innings; the only three Test players in the game all represented Lahore A. •In the Patron’s Trophy in 1989/90, and again in the QeA competition in 1995/96, Karachi Whites met Karachi Blues on two occasions in the same competition – once in the league matches, and again in the final; and in both finals, the result of the earlier league meeting was reversed. In 1989/90 the Blues had beaten the Whites by six wickets in the league, but the Whites won the final by one wicket, with their last-wicket pair of Nauman Mushtaq and Fakhruddin Baloch adding 34 runs to see them home. In 1995/96 the boot was on the other foot: the Whites won the league game by five wickets after forcing the Blues to follow on, but in the final the Blues were the victors by 59 runs, despite trailing on first innings by 116. •The only other time when the same two teams have contested internal matches twice in the same season was in 1993/94, when Karachi Whites beat their Blue rivals both in the league match between them (won by 10 wickets) and in the competition semi-final (won on first innings). The Whites came unstuck in the final, however, in which they were beaten by nine wickets by Lahore City, the only Lahore side in the QeA that season. •Apart from those already mentioned, the only other innings victories in internal matches have been in 1956/57, when Karachi Whites beat the Blues by an innings and 132 runs – the Whites scored 762 (Hanif Mohammad 228) in their only innings; in 1957/58, when East Pakistan A beat their B side by an innings and 80 runs; and in 2001/02, when Lahore Blues beat the Whites by an innings and 18 runs. You may draw your own conclusions from the above details about the relative strengths of the different sides from the same organisations. In my view they broadly corroborate Abid Ali Kazi’s statement that the ‘colour’ sides were selected to be roughly equal in quality, whereas sides called ‘A’ seem consistently to have been superior to Bs and Cs. A further indication that neither of today’s sides in Karachi, and neither of those in Lahore, is regarded as the city’s ‘first team’ is the fact that, especially in recent years, they have shared the principal grounds in the city, rather than one side always having first call on the main ground. Thus between 1996/97 and 2012/13 inclusive, on the 37 occasions when Karachi Blues and Whites have played separate but simultaneous home matches, the Blues have played at the National Stadium (the principal