Pakistan's Greatest Opening Batters

More players have opened the batting for Pakistan than have opened for almost any other Test nation, and that fact is the most useful thing to know about the position. It has never been anybody's property for long. Pakistan's fast bowling has a continuous line running from the 1950s to the present; its opening batting has a series of short, brilliant tenures separated by gaps of years in which the selectors tried eight or nine combinations and settled on none of them.

What survives from that churn is a set of individual innings that stand up against anything in the format. The longest innings ever played in a Test was played by a Pakistan opener. So was the slowest hundred. So was the fastest hundred before lunch on the first morning of a match. The same position, across seventy years, has produced the two extremes of tempo and almost everything in between.

The problem with the position

Three things have made opening for Pakistan unusually hard.

The first is the pitches. Home surfaces in Karachi, Lahore and Multan have historically offered new-ball movement in the first hour and then flattened, which punishes the opener and rewards the No. 4. Away tours have gone to England and Australia, where the ball moves for longer. The conditions themselves are described in the guide to Pakistan's pitch types and conditions.

The second is selection. Pakistan has repeatedly promoted a middle-order batter to open in an emergency, kept him there when it worked, and dropped him when it stopped. Mudassar Nazar, Mohammad Hafeez and Azhar Ali all did substantial work at the top of the order having been picked as something else.

The third is that the domestic game has not consistently produced specialist openers. Club and tape-ball cricket rewards hitting, and a great deal of Pakistani batting technique is formed in that environment before a coach sees it. The culture that produces it is covered in the guide to street cricket in Pakistan.

Nazar Mohammad, Lucknow 1952, and eight and a half hours

Pakistan's first Test was at Delhi in October 1952, and Nazar Mohammad faced the first ball ever bowled to a Pakistani in the format. In the next match, at Lucknow, on a matting surface, he became his country's first Test centurion, carrying his bat for 124 not out in eight hours thirty-five minutes and setting up an innings victory in Pakistan's second-ever Test.

He also became the first player in Test history to be on the field for every ball of a match, which is the kind of statistic that sounds like a curiosity until you consider what it required: batting through both Pakistan innings without being dismissed, and fielding through both of India's.

His career was cut short soon afterwards by a hand injury, so the aggregate is small. But he set two things in motion. One was a Pakistani willingness to bat for extremely long periods that would define the next decade. The other was a family line — his son, Mudassar Nazar, would open for Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s and take the family's association with slow, patient batting to an extreme nobody has matched since.

Hanif Mohammad: 970 minutes at Bridgetown, 499 at Karachi

Hanif Mohammad is the only Pakistani opener whose reputation needs no context at all. At Bridgetown in the 1957-58 series, following on against West Indies and facing an innings defeat, he batted for 970 minutes and made 337. It is still the longest innings played in Test cricket, and the match was saved.

A year later, in January 1959, he made 499 for Karachi against Bahawalpur — run out going for the five-hundredth run off the last ball of the day, after 640 minutes at the crease. That was the highest first-class score in the world and it stood for more than thirty-five years, until Brian Lara passed it in 1994.

The two innings together define what Pakistan asked of its openers in that era. There was no strike-rate conversation. The purpose of an opener was to remove the possibility of defeat, and Hanif was better at that than anyone in the game. He was small, he was almost impossible to dismiss, and the nickname he acquired — the Little Master — was later applied to two other batters, both of whom came after him.

Majid Khan's hundred before lunch

The opposite pole arrived in Karachi in late October 1976. Against New Zealand, Majid Khan reached a hundred from 74 balls before lunch on the first morning of a Test, went past it after the interval, and was out for 112. He was only the fourth batter in the history of the format to make a first-day pre-lunch hundred, and the first who was not Australian; the previous instance had come some forty-six years earlier.

Majid is the reference point for a particular Pakistani ideal — the batter who is elegant, in a hurry, and entirely unbothered. He also made 530 runs in the five Tests in the West Indies in 1976-77, which was the highest aggregate in a hard series against a genuinely fast attack, and he opened and batted in the middle order in the same career without appearing to change anything. He captained Pakistan, later ran the Pakistan Cricket Board, and is one of the very few people to have been central to the game here as player and administrator both.

Mudassar and Mohsin: the slowest hundred and the Lord's double

Mudassar Nazar opened against England at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore in December 1977 and took 557 minutes to reach three figures, off 419 balls. It is the slowest Test century ever recorded by time, and no one has been near it since. He then accelerated, which is the detail people forget, and finished with 114 from 449 balls. He was twenty-one.

Mohsin Khan's contribution came at Lord's in August 1982, where he made 200 across roughly eight and a quarter hours, from 386 balls with 23 fours. It was the first double century by a Pakistani at the ground, it went on the honours board, and it built the total from which Pakistan bowled England out twice to win their first Test at Lord's. Those matches sit inside the longer story of the Pakistan-England rivalry.

Saeed Anwar at Chennai

Saeed Anwar is the best one-day opener Pakistan has produced and one of the best any country has. At Chennai in May 1997, in the Independence Cup, he made 194 from 146 balls against India with 22 fours and five sixes, including three consecutive sixes off Anil Kumble. It beat Viv Richards' 189 as the highest individual score in one-day international cricket and it stood as the record for thirteen years, until Sachin Tendulkar's double century in 2010.

He finished with 8,824 one-day international runs and 31 international centuries across both formats, most of them in the fifty-over game. He was also a genuine Test opener rather than a white-ball specialist, which distinguishes him from a good deal of what came after. The way Pakistan's fifty-over batting developed around him is traced in the guide to Pakistan's ODI cricket history.

Azhar Ali under lights in Dubai

Azhar Ali was picked as a middle-order batter and became an opener because Pakistan needed one. In October 2016, against West Indies at Dubai, he made 302 not out from 469 balls with 23 fours and two sixes — the first triple century made in a day-night Test, and only the fourth by a Pakistani after Hanif, Inzamam-ul-Haq and Younis Khan.

That innings is inseparable from where it was played. Pakistan spent most of a decade staging its home Tests in the Gulf, on surfaces that suited long batting, and Azhar's career took its shape there. He opened with Sami Aslam on the first day of that match for a 215-run stand, and Babar Azam made his Test debut in the same innings. The wider arrangement behind those years is set out in the guide to Pakistan's home series in the UAE.

Bulawayo 2018, and the white-ball specialists

Saeed Anwar's 194 stood as the highest score by a Pakistan batter in a one-day international for more than twenty-one years. It was finally passed at Bulawayo on 20 July 2018, when Fakhar Zaman made 210 not out from 156 balls against Zimbabwe with 28 fours and five sixes, becoming the first Pakistani to reach a double century in the format.

The rest of that scorecard matters as much as the individual score. Fakhar and Imam-ul-Haq, both left-handers, put on 304 for the first wicket — a Pakistan record opening stand — and Pakistan finished on 399 for 1, the highest total the country has made in a one-day international. Imam made 113 from 122 balls at the other end. Three years later Fakhar made 193 chasing in South Africa and Pakistan still lost, which is the more representative outcome for a Pakistan opener playing that way.

Fakhar's career illustrates the modern split. He is a limited-overs opener who has played very little Test cricket, and Pakistan has increasingly picked different men for the two jobs. That was not true of Saeed Anwar or Majid Khan, both of whom did both, and it is one of the clearer changes in the role over the last two decades. The franchise calendar has accelerated it: an opener with a reputation in the Pakistan Super League now has a route to national selection that does not pass through four-day cricket at all.

Galle 2022, and the current pair

The best recent innings by a Pakistan opener was played in Sri Lanka in July 2022. Chasing 342 at Galle, Abdullah Shafique batted through the fourth innings for 160 not out and hit the winning runs on the fifth evening. It was, at the time, the largest successful fourth-innings chase completed in Asia, and Pakistan won by four wickets.

Since then the position has behaved as it always does. Shafique, Imam-ul-Haq, Shan Masood, Abid Ali and Saim Ayub have all held it, none of them continuously, and the return of Test cricket to Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi and Multan has altered what the job requires. Home Tests on turning surfaces ask an opener to survive spin from the tenth over rather than seam from the first, and that is a different skill from the one Pakistan's openers were selected for in the Gulf years.

The pairs that lasted, and the ones that did not

Continuity is the missing element. A handful of Pakistan opening pairs have played more than a couple of dozen Tests together; most have played a handful.

Pairing	Era	Why it worked, or did not
Hanif Mohammad and Imtiaz Ahmed	1950s	Complementary tempos; Imtiaz also kept wicket
Majid Khan and Sadiq Mohammad	1970s	Left-right combination, both attacking
Mudassar Nazar and Mohsin Khan	Early 1980s	The most productive settled pair of the era
Aamer Sohail and Saeed Anwar	1990s	Two left-handers, both capable of very quick starts
Taufeeq Umar and various	2000s	Partners changed almost every series
Mohammad Hafeez and various	2010s	Hafeez was the constant; the other end was not
Azhar Ali and Sami Aslam	Mid-2010s	Effective in the Gulf, short-lived

The middle-order batters had the opposite experience: Javed Miandad, Inzamam and Younis Khan held their positions for years at a time, which is examined in the companion guide to Pakistan's middle-order batting. The instability at the top is one reason the middle order was so often batting in a crisis.

What the list adds up to

Pakistan's openers have supplied the extremes rather than the averages. The longest innings in Test cricket, the slowest hundred, the first pre-lunch hundred by a non-Australian, the highest one-day score of its time, the first triple century in a floodlit Test. What they have not supplied is a settled pair for more than a few years running, and that is the honest summary. For the domestic competition where the next one has to be found, see the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy guide; for everything else about the game here, the cricket in Pakistan hub is the place to start. If the tempo comparisons above are unfamiliar, batting average and strike rate explains what each measures.

Sources and method

Innings details are drawn from official scorecards and contemporary reports: Nazar Mohammad at Lucknow, Hanif at Bridgetown and Karachi, Majid at Karachi, Mudassar at the Gaddafi Stadium, Mohsin on the Lord's honours board, Saeed Anwar at Chennai, Azhar Ali at Dubai and Abdullah Shafique at Galle. Ball-faced and minute figures for the older innings vary slightly between published sources, and where they do, the figure recorded by the Pakistan Cricket Board or the host ground has been preferred. Career aggregates are as published at retirement for players who have retired, and described rather than fixed for those still playing. The selection and ordering are editorial, not computed.