ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2020

306 Pakistan in 2019/20 outplayed to lose by an innings, the highlight being a hat-trick by the hugely promising Nadeem Shah. If he and his slightly more experienced quick-bowling partner Shaheen Shah Afridi can stay fit, Pakistan have the makings of an outstanding pace attack for the future.  Either side of their two series at home, Pakistan also played two away Test series. Of that inAustralia in November/December it is perhaps a case of the less said the better, as both games were lost by an innings with few redeeming performances from either batsmen or bowlers. The three-match series in England in August 2020 also ended in defeat, this time by a score of 1-0 with the other two matches drawn thanks to major interventions from rain and bad light. But off the field the Pakistan side received great credit for their willingness to travel to and play in England at a time when the pandemic meant that the sides had to be locked down in their hotels throughout the tour. England’s cricket-lovers will be for ever grateful to Pakistan, and to earlier visitors West Indies, for keeping Test cricket alive during the bleakest of summers.  After such a momentous few months of Test cricket for Pakistan, somehow the ICC rankings and the World Test Championship seem of relatively little consequence. But it should be recorded that after the Tests in England they were in precisely the same position in the former – seventh – that they had occupied a year previously, whilst after playing four qualifying series they occupied a disappointing fifth place in the WTC.  In the season of 2019/20 in Pakistan, the leading runscorers and wicket-takers all plied their trade in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy alone. Three batsmen – two of them, Kamran Akmal and Salman Butt, from Central Punjab – passed the 900-run mark, but Baluchistan’s Imran Butt headed the lists with 934 runs at 62.26. Second and third places among the wicket-takers were also occupied by players from Central Punjab (Bilal Asif and Zafar Gohar), but neither could match the performance of Northern Areas’ slow left-armer Nauman Ali, who with 54 wickets at 25.38 was the only bowler to reach fifty wickets. (KSW)  NOTE: The reduction in the number of teams and players this season means far fewer namesakes than is usual in Pakistan. However, the complete overhaul of the competing sides means that we cannot adopt our usual practice of assuming that, unless otherwise stated, a player may be taken as identical to a cricketer of the same name playing for the same side last year. The approach that has been taken this year is therefore that a note is provided if two or more cricketers of the same name appeared in 2019/20, or if only one cricketer of a given name appeared in 2019/20 but a different cricketer, or more than one cricketer, of the same name appeared in 2018/19. A note is also provided (except for Pakistan Test players) if a cricketer’s last appearance before 2019/20 was not in the Pakistan domestic season 2018/19 (i.e. if it was in an earlier season, or outside Pakistan). Quaid-e-Azam Trophy 2019/20: Final table P W L D BatBP BowBP Pts NetRR 16 0 5 1 Central Punjab 10 3 1 6 30 25 133 0.191 2 Northern Areas 10 3 2 5 32 25 130 0.376 3 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 10 2 1 7 36 21 124 -0.058 4 Southern Punjab 10 1 0 9 36 15 112 0.092 5 Sindh 10 0 2 8 26 24 90 -0.158 6 Baluchistan 10 0 3 7 28 21 84 -0.441 FINAL: Central Punjab beat Northern Areas by an innings and 16 runs.