Pakistan's 2009 T20 World Cup Win at Lord's

Three months before the 2009 World Twenty20 began, gunmen attacked the bus carrying the Sri Lanka team to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore. International cricket in Pakistan stopped that morning and did not restart for years. The side that flew to England in June 2009 had no home ground, no home series to prepare in, and a domestic game suddenly cut off from the international calendar.

They lost their first match of the tournament by 48 runs. Sixteen days later, Younis Khan was on the outfield at Lord's holding the trophy, and the first thing he did with a microphone was ask the rest of the cricket world to come back and play in Pakistan.

The 2009 title is the only global trophy Pakistan have won since Imran Khan's 1992 World Cup side. It is also, in a narrow sense, the most improbable, because at two separate points in the fortnight Pakistan looked like a side about to be sent home.

A tournament with no slack in it

The second World Twenty20 was played in England across a little under a fortnight in June, at Lord's, The Oval and Trent Bridge. Twelve teams were split into four groups of three; two from each went into the Super Eights, then semi-finals and a final.

The format was punishing in one specific way. With only two matches in the opening group, a single defeat left a side needing to win the other one outright. There was no margin for a slow start, no third fixture to correct a bad afternoon, and no net-run-rate cushion to build. Sides that stumbled early either recovered inside a week or went home, and in Pakistan's group the seeding meant England were the obvious qualifier.

Pakistan came into it as beaten finalists from the inaugural edition in South Africa in 2007, where India had held them off by five runs in Johannesburg, Misbah-ul-Haq's scoop to short fine leg the last act of the match. Two years on, most of that side was still available, but the squad had a different shape: a leg-spinning captain-in-waiting in Shahid Afridi, a genuinely quick death bowler in Umar Gul, an off-spinner in Saeed Ajmal who had only recently arrived in international cricket, and a 17-year-old left-arm quick named Mohammad Amir who had played almost no senior cricket at all.

Losing to England, then winning by 82

Pakistan's opening match was against the hosts, and it went badly. England won by 48 runs, which in a three-team group left Pakistan needing to beat the Netherlands and to do it convincingly enough that run rate could not be used against them.

They did. The margin was 82 runs, and it settled qualification without anyone needing a calculator. But the England defeat had already established the tone of the fortnight. This was not a side moving smoothly through a tournament. It was a side repeatedly correcting itself after a mistake.

Group F: a loss, then the two best days of the fortnight

The Super Eights put Pakistan in Group F with Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Ireland. The first match was against Sri Lanka, and Pakistan lost it by 19 runs. That is the second point at which the campaign nearly ended, because it meant both remaining matches had to be won.

Both were, and the manner of the first is the most-remembered piece of bowling in Pakistan's Twenty20 history.

Umar Gul's three overs at The Oval

New Zealand batted first on 13 June and were bowled out for 99 inside 19 overs. Gul bowled three overs, conceded six runs and took five wickets. It was the first five-wicket haul in the history of men's Twenty20 internationals, and at the time the best analysis anyone had returned in the format. Pakistan knocked the runs off in 13.1 overs for the loss of four wickets.

Gul finished the tournament as its leading wicket-taker with 13, bowling almost exclusively in the two phases where Twenty20 bowling is hardest: the opening over and the last. His method was reverse swing at pace to a full length, a skill Pakistan had been developing for a generation and which is set out in the guide to how reverse swing became a Pakistani speciality.

Kamran Akmal against Ireland

Two days later Pakistan made 159 for 5 against Ireland at The Oval and won by 39 runs, Ireland finishing on 120 for 9. Kamran Akmal made 57 and took two stumpings, which is a fair summary of what he gave that team: quick runs at the top, and a wicketkeeper willing to stand up to the stumps against spin and accept the risk that came with it.

Pakistan reached the semi-finals having lost to the two strongest sides they had met and beaten everyone else heavily.

Trent Bridge, and 23 off the last over

The first semi-final, on 18 June at Trent Bridge, was against South Africa, who had come through the tournament as the form side and had not been beaten.

Pakistan made 149 for 4. Afridi hit 51 and Shoaib Malik 34, and the innings was notable mainly for being controlled rather than frantic, Afridi batting with a straighter bat and staying longer than his reputation implied. It did not look like enough.

South Africa were held to 142 for 5. Jacques Kallis made 64 and JP Duminy finished unbeaten on 44, and for long stretches the chase was under control. Afridi bowled four overs for 16 and took two wickets, which on a good surface in a 20-over innings is close to the maximum a leg-spinner can contribute. The decisive wicket was Kallis, caught on the long-on boundary off Ajmal, and after that South Africa needed 23 from the final over.

Younis Khan gave that over to Amir, who was 17 and playing in his first global tournament. Fifteen came off it. Pakistan won by seven runs and were in a second consecutive final.

The unbeaten side waiting in the final

Sri Lanka arrived at Lord's without having lost a match. They had topped Group F, beaten Pakistan on the way through, and then dismantled the West Indies in the second semi-final at The Oval on 19 June, making 158 for 5 and bowling the West Indies out for 101 to win by 57 runs.

The reason was largely one batter. Tillakaratne Dilshan made 96 not out in that semi-final, the highest individual score of the tournament, and finished the fortnight with 317 runs and the player of the series award. He was also the man who had made the paddle-scoop over the keeper's head into a repeatable scoring shot rather than a novelty, and in a tournament of low totals on slow English June surfaces he was the only batter consistently getting ahead of the bowling.

Sri Lanka also had the most complete spin attack in the competition, with Muttiah Muralitharan and the left-arm of Sanath Jayasuriya available to bowl through the middle overs. On paper it was a mismatch. Pakistan had lost two of their six matches; Sri Lanka had lost none.

The final: Sangakkara's 64, and Afridi's answer

The final was played at Lord's on 21 June, the second all-Asian decider in the tournament's short history.

Kumar Sangakkara won the toss and batted. Dilshan went early, and from there Sri Lanka never got away. Abdul Razzaq, recalled to the side after a long absence, bowled three overs for 20 and took three wickets. Afridi's four overs cost 20. Gul and Amir took one each. Sangakkara held the innings together for an unbeaten 64 from 52 balls and Angelo Mathews hit 35 from 24 at the end, but 138 for 6 on a Lord's surface in June was a total Pakistan could chase without gambling.

They chased it in 18.4 overs for the loss of two wickets. Kamran Akmal made 37 from 28. Afridi came in and made 54 not out from 40 balls with two fours and two sixes, his second consecutive match-winning fifty and the innings that answered the standing charge that he could not build one. Muttiah Muralitharan conceded 20 from three overs and Sanath Jayasuriya eight from two, and neither could create the pressure Sri Lanka needed.

Afridi was player of the match. Pakistan became the second side to win the World Twenty20, after India two years earlier.

Stage	Opponent	Result
Group B	England	Lost by 48 runs
Group B	Netherlands	Won by 82 runs
Super Eights	Sri Lanka	Lost by 19 runs
Super Eights	New Zealand	Won by 6 wickets
Super Eights	Ireland	Won by 39 runs
Semi-final	South Africa	Won by 7 runs
Final	Sri Lanka	Won by 8 wickets

The plea at the presentation

What Younis Khan said afterwards mattered as much at home as the result. He used the presentation to argue for the return of international cricket to Pakistani grounds, and announced his own retirement from Twenty20 internationals in the same breath. The team dedicated the win to Bob Woolmer, their former coach, who had died in the Caribbean during the 2007 World Cup.

The plea did not work quickly. Full international cricket did not return to Pakistan for years, and the national side spent most of the following decade playing its home fixtures in the Emirates, a period covered in the guide to Pakistan's home series in the UAE. The eventual restoration of Test and one-day cricket at the National Stadium in Karachi came a long way after 2009.

Younis's own retirement lasted about a year. He played three more Twenty20 internationals in New Zealand and was then not picked in the format again.

What became of the side

The 2009 team did not hold together. Within fourteen months the tour of England in 2010 had produced the spot-fixing case that removed Amir, Mohammad Asif and the captain Salman Butt from the game, and Pakistan lost the youngest and most gifted bowler of the 2009 tournament for five years. Amir returned in 2016 and played on into the following decade, but the trajectory of 2009 was broken.

Afridi took over the captaincy and led Pakistan to the semi-finals of the 2010 and 2012 editions. Pakistan reached the semi-finals again in 2021 and the final in 2022, losing to England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The 2009 trophy remains the only one in the format. Set alongside 1992, it puts Pakistan among the small group of nations to have won both the 50-over and 20-over world titles; the wider record is laid out in the guide to Pakistan at the men's World Cup and in the history of the T20 World Cup.

The deeper legacy is a bowling one. Gul's death overs and Amir's new-ball spells at 17 established the template Pakistan have used in white-ball cricket ever since: pick fast bowlers who can move the ball late, back them in the hardest overs, and accept that the batting will be volatile. That inheritance is traced in the guide to Pakistan's fast bowling tradition, and the rest of the country's game is collected on the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Why the win is read differently at home

Outside Pakistan, 2009 is usually filed as a good tournament won by a mercurial side. Inside Pakistan it carries a weight that has little to do with cricket. It happened in the first summer after the game was driven out of the country, in a year when the national team's venue arrangements were genuinely unclear, and it was won by a squad whose senior players had spent the spring watching their home season collapse.

There is a reasonable argument that the trophy delayed rather than accelerated reform, because success makes structural problems easier to ignore, and the domestic system went through several more rounds of restructuring afterwards without settling. That argument is worth taking seriously. What is not in dispute is that for a fortnight in June 2009 the side played the tournament in the way Pakistani cricket is supposed to look: badly for a week, then unanswerably.

Sources and method

This page rests on the ICC's tournament records for the 2009 World Twenty20, the published scorecards for each of Pakistan's seven matches, contemporary match reports and the Wisden Almanack account of the final. Player figures, including Gul's five for six, Afridi's two fifties and Sangakkara's unbeaten 64, come from those official scorecards. Details that could not be confirmed in an authoritative record, such as exact attendance, have been left out. No figure on this page has been calculated by us; every number quoted is one already published in a match record.