ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2020

305 Pakistan in 2019/20 In any other year, the big news from cricket in Pakistan would have been about the radical, bottom-up restructuring of domestic cricket in the country. The new arrangements were designed to provide a clearer pathway towards the top for cricketers from all part of the country, and to reduce the bureaucracy underlying the domestic game. In particular, in place of the former 16 regional organisations and their umpteen ‘departmental’ equivalents (banks, corporations and so on), domestic cricket in Pakistan was henceforth to be structured around just six geographically- based cricket associations.  As a result, the first-class competition for the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy was completely revamped. Gone were the previous seasons’ 16 teams, and the complex process of pools and Super Eights to find the overall winners. Gone were the departmental sides that had dominated the competition for so many years. And gone too was the programme that had produced as many as 69 domestic first- class matches each season: that figure was now reduced to just 31.  The competition now involved only six sides, representing the six cricket associations, and was played as a single league in double round-robin format, with the top two clubs then contesting a final to decide the competition winners. Other innovations included the abolition of the mandatory coin-toss: instead, the visiting team could bowl first if it so wished.  For the record, the six associations, with the principal former regions that they absorbed, were as follows: Baluchistan (Quetta); Central Punjab (Lahore, Faisalabad, Sialkot); Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Peshawar, FATA, Abbottabad); Northern Areas (Rawalpindi, Islamabad); Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad); and Southern Punjab (Bahawalpur, Multan).  Once the action began, Central Punjab were quickly into their stride. Two innings victories in their first three matches took them to the top of the table, a position they never relinquished. For much of the season it looked as though Southern Punjab would be the second team in the final, but they fell away over their last three matches, while Northern Areas – last in the table with four matches to go – hit a burst of form that saw them finish the league phase only three points behind Central Punjab.  Scheduled for five days, the final proved a one-sided affair. A double-century from Umar Akmal and a century from national captainAzhar Ali took Central Punjab’s first-innings lead to 421 before they declared. First innings lead would have been enough to secure the title, and when Northern Areas were 400-5 in their second innings a high-scoring draw looked a likely result. But those last five wickets went down for just five more runs, and Central Punjab were the victors by an innings, and the first winners of the new-style QeA competition.  In any other year… but this was a year unlike any other for Pakistani cricket. For most of their supporters 2019/20 was memorable above all as the season when Test cricket finally returned to the country, after the best part of 11 years in which security concerns had, in effect, closed it off to all sporting visitors. The big moment came on 11 December when Sri Lanka – Pakistan’s last opponents at home back in March 2009 – began a two-Test series with a match at Rawalpindi. The fact that the match itself was ruined by rain (days 2 to 4 between them provided less than 24 overs of actual play, and Sri Lanka were still batting in the first innings of the match when the fifth day began) was as nothing compared to the symbolic significance of the occasion. For the second Test the sides moved to Karachi, where in their second innings the home side’s first four batsmen all made centuries – only the second time this had ever happened in a Test match – and 16-year-old Nadeem Shah took five wickets in Sri Lanka’s second innings, as a first-innings deficit of 80 was turned into an eventual win by 263 runs.  A second Test series at home started in February, again at Rawalpindi, with Bangladesh the visitors. There was always planned to be a big gap between the two Tests of the series, with the second match originally scheduled for April; but the pandemic intervened, and at the time of writing, eight months on, the game has yet to be rearranged. At Rawalpindi Bangladesh were predictably