“HBL are either going to be glorious or disastrous this season – in either case it’ll be fun while it lasts.”
Those were the words with which I finished HBL’s preview of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy before this season. They had banked on signing Umar Akmal and Ahmed Shehzad and hoped that their other experienced players could bat around those two signings to create a successful team. Beating the ever-dominant SNGPL, who were chasing their sixth title in seven years, in the final of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy with runs from Umar Akmal and their experienced batsmen showed that their gamble had well and truly paid off. In fact, not only did HBL win their first Quaid-e-Azam Trophy in eight years, they also won the Quaid-e-Azam Cup to achieve a unique double in the domestic game. But HBL weren’t the only winners from this domestic season.
The Rise of Regions?
In 2014/15 the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy reverted to an all-encompassing format: in the seasons prior to that the departments and regions played First Class cricket in separate four-day tournaments. Five years on from that and it appears that the regions may finally be catching up.
The Pakistani domestic game is divided among regions – filled with young players trying to make a mark, experienced players who are in their final years (or whose departments are in Grade II, the tier below the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy) and a lot of mediocre players who are not good enough to make it big – and departments, who usually hoard the best and most consistent players in Pakistan. The financial muscle of departments, and the relative poverty of regions means that this is a structural problem rather than a trend. The result is a domestic system that follows the economic model that is prevalent the world over: the haves dominate the have-nots, and if the have-nots have something worth fighting back with then it’s just incorporated into the possession of the haves.
On a sidenote: This is one of the reasons the numbers for Pakistani domestic players are often misleading. I talked about Usman Salahuddin’s numbers before his Test debut here but Usman is an example of the norm, rather than a particularly unique case.
But the good news is that the regional teams may finally be fighting back. This season was, by far, the best season they’ve had since the realignment five years ago.
| Regional Teams vs Departmental Teams Matches (Last 5 Seasons) | |||||||
| QeA Trophy Season | Region Win | Draw | Department Win | Win %age | |||
| 2014/15 | 4 | 10 | 22 | 13% | |||
| 2015/16 | 1 | 22 | 15 | 3% | |||
| 2016/17 | 4 | 12 | 19 | 11% | |||
| 2017/18 | 8 | 4 | 24 | 22% | |||
| 2018/19 | 11 | 6 | 22 | 28% | |||
While the win-loss ratio is still only at 0.50 it’s a far cry from just three seasons ago when regions won only one of their thirty-eight matches against department teams!
There are three reason for why there’s been an uptick – beyond the obvious one, which is that the more minnows play with the major teams, the better they will get (cc: ICC).
Firstly, you just have to look at the regions which have been successful. Six of the eleven victories for regions against departments came from two of the three regions that managed to qualify for the Super Eight round of the competition: Karachi Whites and Peshawar. It’s not a surprise to see these two regions excel since they are also home to perhaps the two most robust club systems in the country, which continue to produce talented players year in, year out.
The second reason is that these regions have been doing this for awhile now, so have the depth to call upon just due to the sheer number of players they’ve produced. So, while Karachi Whites may not have the access to elite Karachiite batsmen like Asad Shafiq or Fawad Alam, they can still have the rights to players like Saad Ali (2017 QeA Trophy top run scorer) and Khurram Manzoor (2018 QeA Trophy top run scorer). Similarly, Peshawar may have lost the services of Iftikhar Ahmed and Mohammad Rizwan to SNGPL, they are still producing batsmen like Sahibzada Farhan and Nabi Gul to take their spots.
But perhaps the most significant reason for the uptick in wins for regions this year was the presence of two departments who were no better than most regional teams. In the tournament preview I talked about how both Pakistan Television and Zarai Taraqqiati Bank Limited were the two department teams likely to fail in the Trophy this year, but even I didn’t expect that these two teams would lose five of their eight matches against regional teams. It turns out that even in this divided economic system you still need some semblance of competence to benefit from your natural advantages.
The Value of Numbers
It’s now common among Pakistani fans and media to quote the numbers that domestic performers achieve – mostly it’s done to cudgel the national selection committee with or propagate their own specific narratives. This, of course, is a positive development from the days of when the only way to discuss cricket in Pakistan was to discuss a player’s “talent” and the only number that mattered was his (official) year of birth.
| Career Record of Top 10 run scorers in 2018/19 Quaid-e-Azam Trophy | ||||
| Player | Career Avg |
Avg vs Regions |
vs Depts |
|
|
1 |
Khurram Manzoor |
38.2 |
38.6 |
38.9 |
|
2 |
Imran Farhat |
42.4 |
39.9 |
48.4 |
|
3 |
Umar Akmal |
43.6 |
49.4 |
40.2 |
|
4 |
Umar Amin |
40.1 |
48.0 |
37.4 |
|
5 |
Fawad Alam |
56.1 |
71.2 |
49.5 |
|
6 |
Iftikhar Ahmed |
40.5 |
45.5 |
34.4 |
|
7 |
Adil Amin |
33.7 |
49.3 |
28.4 |
|
8 |
Israrullah |
35.5 |
45.3 |
21.9 |
|
9 |
Mohammad Hasan |
29.5 |
31.5 |
26.8 |
|
10 |
Imran Rafiq |
42.2 |
34.5 |
51.0 |
The only players in the top ten who have significantly better records against departments than regions (rather than the other way around, as is the norm) are Imran Farhat, who played quite a bit of his cricket when regions were actually good, and Imran Rafiq, who has only played 9 First Class matches in his career thus far.Yet even with this development there is a lack of the understanding of what these domestic numbers actually mean. Considering the discrepancy between regions and departments elaborated above, I decided to do a deep dive. The table below shows the top ten run scorers in this season’s Quaid-e-Azam Trophy and the breakdown of their batting numbers over the course of their careers.
This, by the way, is just a basic breakdown of these batsmen’s numbers, and you imagine that such a breakdown would be the case for most players in the domestic game. The result of this is that when it comes time for selection – whether that’s the national team, the A team or the plethora of underage teams now on the circuit – the numbers taken into consideration (from selectors and the journalists) are cumulative numbers. No one considers whether a player has performed against good attacks or not, whether he has succeeded in challenging conditions or not; what matters is just the final total. Thus, in a domestic system that is built to negate the development of batsmen the players promoted from that are rarely selected after a deep analysis: and then we wonder why Pakistan doesn’t produce quality long format batsmen anymore, and why every batsman has to be “groomed” when he makes the step up to the national team.
My Kingdom For A Spinner
At the conclusion of the QeA Trophy last year I wrote about how among the 40 highest wicket takers in the tournament none were off spinners or leg spinners.
This too is a by-product of domestic pitches. Left arm spinners who bowl wicket to wicket and keep things tight are the norm throughout the domestic game, who are allied with medium pacers who bowl in “the right areas.” The under-par surfaces do the rest: the low bounce and natural variation off the pitch is enough to take wickets. Thus the foremost quality a bowler requires is accuracy, and not skill. The result is that when it comes time for the national team to pick a spinner to partner with Yasir shah they have to go with Bilal Asif, a man with fewer than 60 First Class career wickets, because he is the best possible player available to the selectors.
This year, thankfully, there has been some improvement on this front. Among the 42 bowlers who took over twenty wickets in the Trophy this season there were two off spinners, and alarmingly, still no leg spinner. The two offies to take that mantle were Waleed Ahmed who took 21 wickets at 27, and more impressively Sajid Khan who finished with 34 wickets at 23. Prior to this season the two of them had, combined, played 8 First Class matches. Considering they are both in their mid-20s there’s a chance for the stakeholders of Pakistan cricket, including department teams, to develop these bowlers. The fact that both of them were playing for regional teams, and will most likely be picked up by departments at the end of this season is a glimmer of hope for the domestic game and Pakistan’s spin resources. But this is just the first step in a long journey.
#DomesticCricketKoIzzatDo
That’s the hashtag used whenever a domestic performer does not get selected to the national team or any of the PSL franchises. But I thought about it while going through the final of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy this year.
Considering the lack of international cricket, and the state of other sports in the country, it would not be unreasonable to argue that the Trophy Final is the biggest sporting event that still takes in Pakistan. And yet if you looked at the final that wouldn’t seem to be the case.
Habib Bank deserve credit for asking for their players back from national duty: Abid Ali returned from the A team, and Fahim Ashraf joined the XI too after he didn’t make the XI for Pakistan’s third Test against New Zealand.
SNGPL, though, went another route. Perhaps after five titles in six years the Trophy Final has become just another match for them; or perhaps they have so much faith in their depth that they believed they could still come through. After all, they finished the Final four wickets away from just another title, complaining about the umpiring in the match. But that’s not a situation they would have even been in if they had been as proactive as HBL.
This was the SNGPL XI that missed the final due to national, A team or Emerging Team duties:
- Mohammad Hafeez
- Azhar Ali
- Asad Shafiq
- Mohammad Rizwan
- Hussain Talat
- Asif Ali
- Shadab Khan
- Yasir Shah
- Rahat Ali
- Shaheen Afridi
- Mohammad Abbas
Thus five of the six highest averaging batsmen and five of the nine bowlers that took 10+ First Class wickets this season were missing. This points to the depth that SNGPL have hoarded up through the years, where they’ve almost become the second team for the national Test team, but perhaps this time round they took their success for granted.
In conclusion, though, it’s hard to argue for domestic performers and the game when neither the board, nor the teams and players taking part, seem to consider it their priority. But, of course, that is nothing new, as is the case with everything related to the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy.
One Final Thing
The best bowling figures in a match this season belonged to Abdur Rehman, just days after announcing his international retirement, who took a 14-wicket haul to almost single-handedly drag HBL to the Trophy final.
The second best haul belonged to Mohammad Abbas who took 12-for-94 in the only First Class match he played this season, on a rare dry wicket where all other pacers combined averaged 38.86. Quite frankly, I just needed an excuse to post this video.