Departmental Cricket in Pakistan: A History

For most of the history of Pakistani cricket, the way to make a living from the game was to be employed by a bank. Or an airline, or a gas pipeline company, or a government research laboratory. A promising batter from Multan or a left-arm quick from Sialkot did not sign a professional contract with a provincial side; he was given a job at Habib Bank or Pakistan International Airlines or the Water and Power Development Authority, drew a monthly salary and a pension entitlement, and played cricket for his employer.

The arrangement produced a great deal of Pakistan's best cricket and a fair amount of its worst. Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Zaheer Abbas, Shoaib Akhtar, Saqlain Mushtaq and Mohammad Yousuf all appeared for PIA. Shahid Afridi captained Habib Bank. The teams were serious cricket sides that played four-day matches over decades and won trophies with long honours lists. They also generated first-class fixtures nobody attended between two banks in a stadium designed for fifty thousand people, and they occupied places in a national competition that regional associations argued should have belonged to cities.

In May 2019 the system was dismantled, on the instruction of a prime minister who had himself played for PIA. Within four years the Pakistan Cricket Board had begun bringing it back.

Where the departments came from

The first-class championship, the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, started in the 1953-54 season with a specific purpose: to help selectors pick a side for Pakistan's Test tour of England the following year. The first edition had five regional teams and two departmental ones, played as a knockout. Institutions were part of the structure from the beginning.

The reason they grew was economic rather than sporting. Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s had no professional cricket market. There were no gate receipts worth splitting, no television money, no franchise league. A talented cricketer either had private means or he had a job, and the only organisations able to pay a salary and give a man three months a year off to play were large state-linked employers.

So the state encouraged them to do it. Public-sector corporations, nationalised banks, the railways, the airline and the utilities all raised teams, and the incentive was straightforward: a department that fielded a strong cricket side got prestige, recruited useful employees, and served a national purpose that the government of the day approved of. This is the same logic that produced institutional teams in Indian cricket — Railways, the banks, Air India — and in both countries it lasted for decades because nothing better was available.

The competitions they played for

Departmental cricket had its own first-class trophy alongside the Quaid-e-Azam, and the name of that trophy changed with the politics.

Period	Name
From 1960-61	Ayub Trophy, after President Ayub Khan
From 1970-71	BCCP Trophy
From 1972-73	BCCP Patron's Trophy
From 2012-13	President's Trophy
2019	Discontinued in the domestic restructure
From 2023-24	Refounded

That sequence of names is a compressed history of Pakistani governance, and it is not a coincidence that the trophy was named for a serving head of state during a military government and renamed when that government fell.

Departments also entered the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy itself, which is why the honours board of Pakistan's premier first-class competition mixes city sides with corporations. Karachi's various teams lead it. PIA are the most successful institutional side in the competition, with titles spread across five decades from 1969-70 to the early 2010s, and National Bank have a substantial haul of their own. In the Patron's and President's Trophy, Karachi again lead overall, with Habib Bank, National Bank and Sui Northern Gas Pipelines the most successful departments.

For the competition as it stands today, see the guide to the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy and the Pakistan Cup at one-day level.

What a departmental contract actually was

This is the part that gets lost in the argument, and it is the reason the system had defenders long after it stopped looking modern.

A departmental cricketer was an employee, not a contracted player. That meant a salary paid twelve months a year rather than a retainer for a playing season, medical cover, a pension, and — critically — a job that continued when the cricket stopped. A wicketkeeper who played eight seasons of first-class cricket for a bank and never came close to the national side finished as a bank employee in his early thirties with a career ahead of him. He had not gambled his twenties on cricket and lost.

The scale of the thing was significant. Dozens of institutions fielded sides across the grades, employing hundreds of cricketers between them, in a country where the alternative for most of them was nothing at all. Pakistan's cricket has always been produced in volume by street and tape-ball cricket in places with no facilities, and the departments were the mechanism that turned a share of that raw supply into people who could afford to keep playing.

The list of employers reads like an inventory of the Pakistani state:

• Pakistan International Airlines — founded as a cricket team in 1960, first first-class match in May 1961 under Hanif Mohammad's captaincy, more than four hundred first-class matches before their last in November 2016.
• Habib Bank Limited — entered domestic cricket in 1975-76 and won a great deal quickly, including the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy in 1977-78 and again in 2010-11.
• National Bank of Pakistan — one of the most consistently successful departments across both trophies.
• United Bank Limited — a major force in the earlier era, and the sponsor of a trophy of its own.
• Sui Northern Gas Pipelines and Sui Southern Gas — the utilities, strong from the 1990s onwards.
• Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) — a long-standing side with a substantial playing staff.
• Khan Research Laboratories — the nuclear research institution, and an unlikely but genuinely competitive cricket team.
• Pakistan Railways, Pakistan Customs, State Bank of Pakistan, Pakistan Television, Allied Bank, ZTBL — the second tier of institutional cricket, and for many players the difference between a career and none.

The cricketers it produced

The strongest defence of the system is the list of people who came through it, and PIA's alone is remarkable. Hanif Mohammad captained the side in its first first-class match. Zaheer Abbas played for them. So did Imran Khan, before and during the years he was the best all-round cricketer in the world. Wasim Akram and Saqlain Mushtaq played for PIA; so did Moin Khan behind the stumps, and Shoaib Akhtar, and Mohammad Yousuf.

That is not a coincidence of one employer being lucky. PIA had money, could move players around the country on its own aircraft, and had the pick of Karachi's enormous supply of cricketers. A strong department functioned as a professional club with a wage bill, and the good ones were better organised than most regional associations of the same era.

Habib Bank's story ends more pointedly. They won the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy in 2018-19 — the last season before the restructure — and in April 2019 the bank declined to renew its players' contracts and closed the team down. The reigning first-class champions of Pakistan ceased to exist between one season and the next.

The bowling traditions that came out of this system, particularly the fast bowling, are covered through the history of reverse swing and the wider cricket in Pakistan hub.

The case against departments

The criticisms were real, and they had been made for years before anyone acted on them.

The first was about competitive quality. A first-class championship containing sixteen or eighteen teams, several of them institutions with narrow recruitment, spread the available talent very thin. A young batter could make a thousand runs in a season against bowling that would not have taken a wicket in a stronger competition, and arrive in a Test side unprepared. Concentrating the same players into fewer, stronger teams was supposed to fix this.

The second was about identity and crowds. Nobody supports a bank. Departmental fixtures were played in front of empty stands because there was no community attached to the result, and a domestic competition that generates no public interest generates no revenue, which keeps it dependent on the board and the state. Regional teams, the argument ran, could build followings the way county and state sides do elsewhere.

The third was about patronage. Selection for a departmental side was a decision made inside an institution, not a sporting one made by a selection panel with any accountability, and the potential for that to go wrong is obvious. Players complained for decades about being picked or dropped for reasons unrelated to cricket.

The 2019 abolition, and the reversal

In May 2019 the government of Imran Khan — a former PIA cricketer, and a captain who had spent his career complaining about the standard of Pakistani domestic cricket — restructured the domestic game. Departmental teams were removed from the first-class structure and replaced by six regional sides organised on provincial lines, sitting above an inter-city tier and a base of city cricket associations. The mechanics of that change, and how well it worked, are set out through the PCB's structure.

What the reform did not do was replace the employment. Six elite teams cannot pay as many cricketers as twenty institutions could, and a central contract for a squad of twenty is not the same as a job for life at a bank. Players who had been employees became contracted professionals with shorter horizons, and a substantial number of cricketers on the fringe of the first-class game lost both their team and their income.

The board reversed course. In January 2023 the PCB announced it would bring departments back, describing the older arrangement as the tried and tested model, and the President's Trophy was refounded from the 2023-24 season as a first-class competition for institutional sides. The Quaid-e-Azam Trophy meanwhile continued as a regional competition — the 2023-24 edition was contested by eight regional teams and won by Karachi Whites — so the two structures now run alongside each other rather than one replacing the other.

What the episode actually showed

The honest reading is that both sides of the argument were right about different things.

The reformers were right that a first-class competition of eighteen thinly staffed teams was not preparing Test cricketers well, and that a domestic game with no public following is financially trapped. Nothing about the 2019 reasoning was foolish.

The departments' defenders were right that in a country with Pakistan's economics, cricket's problem is not an excess of teams but a shortage of ways for a good cricketer to be paid. Remove the employment and the talent does not concentrate; a portion of it simply stops playing. That is a distinct problem from the one the reforms were designed to solve, and abolishing departments made it worse while making the other one better.

What has emerged is a compromise: a strong regional first-class competition at the top, a departmental competition running in parallel to keep people employed, and the franchise money of the Pakistan Super League providing a third route that did not exist when any of this was designed. Whether it holds depends on the next board, which in Pakistani cricket is never a settled question. Structural reform here has a habit of being reversed by the administration that follows the one that introduced it, and the departmental question has now been answered in both directions inside a single decade. The safest prediction is that the shape of Pakistan's domestic game in ten years' time will not be the shape it has now. The broader history sits on the cricket in Pakistan hub and in the history of Pakistan cricket.

Sources and method

This page is based on the Pakistan Cricket Board's published tournament records and announcements, the documented competition histories of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy and the trophy that ran under the Ayub, BCCP, Patron's and President's names, and team records for the individual departments described. Team founding dates, first and last matches, honours and closure dates are taken from published records; where sources give differing title counts for a department, the total is described rather than stated as a figure, because the record for older Pakistani domestic competitions is not consistent across sources. Player affiliations were checked against first-class records before inclusion. The account of why the 2019 reform was made and what it cost is an interpretation of publicly stated positions on both sides, offered as such rather than as established fact, and no figure for the number of players affected is given because we could not verify one. Nothing here is derived from our own datasets.