Pakistan T20I History: Finals, Titles and Falls

Pakistan has played in three Twenty20 World Cup finals and won one of them, and it has also lost to the United States in a Super Over in Texas. Both facts belong to the same team culture. The format's short duration magnifies precisely the two things Pakistani cricket has in surplus — fast bowlers who take wickets in the first six overs, and batters who play shots that should not come off — and it removes almost all of the protection that a longer game gives a side having a bad day.

Twenty20 also arrived at a convenient moment. Pakistan already had a national game full of the skills the format needed: tape-ball cricket had been producing yorker bowlers and improvising hitters for decades before anybody invented a professional twenty-over competition, and the transition cost Pakistani cricketers almost nothing.

What follows is the international record, tournament by tournament and era by era. The domestic franchise league and the 2009 title have pages of their own; this is the story of the national side in the format.

Bristol, 2006

Pakistan's first Twenty20 international was against England at the Bristol County Ground on 28 August 2006. The format was still treated as an exhibition by most boards, played at the end of a tour, and neither side took the field with a settled twenty-over method because none existed.

Within a year that had changed, because the ICC scheduled a World Twenty20 for September 2007 and every full member had to work out what the game was for. Pakistan's answer was straightforward and turned out to be roughly correct: bowl fast, take wickets, and let the batting improvise. The habits behind it are described in the guides to the fast bowling tradition and to tape-ball cricket.

Johannesburg 2007: a bowl-out, and five runs

The first tournament produced two matches against India and two defeats, neither of them by a normal margin.

The group match at Kingsmead in Durban finished level: India made 141 for 9, Pakistan matched it, and Misbah-ul-Haq was run out from the last ball of the innings. With no super over in the regulations, the match went to a bowl-out at an unguarded set of stumps, and India won it 3-0 through Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh and Robin Uthappa. It is the only occasion a Pakistan international has been settled that way and it now reads as a relic.

The final at the Wanderers on 24 September was closer than the scoreline suggests. India made 157 for 5, Gautam Gambhir scoring 75 from 54 balls. Pakistan collapsed to 104 for 7 and Misbah, batting at seven, took them to within 13 with 43 from 38 balls including four sixes. With six needed from four balls he attempted a scoop over short fine leg off Joginder Sharma and was caught by Sreesanth. Pakistan were bowled out for 152 with three balls unused; India won by five runs. Irfan Pathan took three for 16 and was player of the match.

Misbah's shot has been argued about in Pakistan ever since. The defence, which is the correct one, is that he had been the only batter in the innings whose method was working and he was attempting the shot that had already brought him three of his sixes.

Lord's 2009, then two semi-finals

Pakistan won the second tournament, beating Sri Lanka in the final at Lord's in June 2009 with Shahid Afridi making the runs and Younis Khan captaining. That fortnight has a page of its own: Pakistan's 2009 T20 World Cup win.

What followed was a run of consistency Pakistan has never repeated in a global tournament. They reached the semi-finals in 2010 in the Caribbean and again in 2012 in Sri Lanka, which meant four consecutive tournaments in the last four: a final, a title and two semi-finals across five years.

The method throughout was the same. Pakistan's spinners — Afridi, Saeed Ajmal and later Mohammad Hafeez — bowled through the middle overs at an economy that made the format look easy, and the seamers took wickets at both ends of the innings. The batting was the weakness and everybody knew it, including the selectors.

2014 and 2016: the method goes stale

Pakistan did not reach the knockout stage of the 2014 tournament in Bangladesh and did not reach it in India in 2016 either. The reason was not a collapse in bowling standards but a change in what the format required.

By the mid-2010s international Twenty20 batting had reorganised around the powerplay, and sides had learned to attack spin through the middle overs rather than survive it. A Pakistan side built to strangle an innings from overs seven to fifteen found that opponents were now scoring at eight an over in that phase. Meanwhile Pakistan's own batting was still constructed as though 150 was a competitive total. It took the arrival of a franchise league to change that, a story told in the guide to the Pakistan Super League.

Number one in the world, and the Babar-Rizwan method

Pakistan first reached number one in the ICC Twenty20 international rankings on 1 November 2017, and held a leading position for much of the following two years. The reason was a settled side, an unusually deep pool of fast bowlers, and a top order that had solved the problem of the first ten overs.

The partnership that defined it was Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan. In April 2021 they put on 197 against South Africa, the highest stand for any wicket by a Pakistan pair in the format at the time, and in September 2022 they made an unbeaten 203 together. Rizwan's 2021 was extraordinary by any measure: 1,326 runs in 26 Twenty20 international innings at an average above 73, the most runs any batter has made in the format in a calendar year, and he was keeping wicket throughout — his place in the country's keeping tradition is covered among the great wicketkeepers.

The criticism of the pair, which grew as the years passed, was that they batted too long together and left the middle order nothing to do with the last five overs. The counter-argument is that a Pakistan top order which loses two wickets in the powerplay has historically lost the match, and that removing that risk was worth a slower start. Both readings have evidence behind them. What is not in dispute is that between them they solved a problem the side had carried since 2006.

Dubai 2021: ten wickets

At Dubai in October 2021, Pakistan beat India by ten wickets in a Twenty20 World Cup match. It was Pakistan's first World Cup win over India in any format, ending a sequence that had run since 1992 and had become a genuine burden, and Babar and Rizwan chased the target without being separated. The match is dealt with in full in the guide to the India-Pakistan rivalry.

Pakistan then won every match in their Super 12 group, and Babar finished as the tournament's leading run-scorer with 303. The semi-final against Australia was lost by five wickets, which is the least remembered part of that campaign and the part that most resembles the rest of Pakistan's tournament history.

Melbourne 2022

The 2022 tournament in Australia began with two defeats and Pakistan effectively out, and ended with them in the final on 13 November at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of 80,462 people. The route there involved results elsewhere going Pakistan's way and a semi-final win, and Pakistan arrived at the MCG having won four in a row.

The final went the way most Pakistani finals go. Pakistan made 137 for 8 on a slow surface, Shan Masood top-scoring with 38 from 28 and Babar making 32, while Sam Curran took three for 12 and was named player of the match and player of the tournament. England were 84 for 4 and struggling when Shaheen Afridi jarred his right knee taking a catch in the thirteenth over; he came back to bowl, pulled out of his run-up and left the field, and England took 138 for 5 in nineteen overs with Ben Stokes 52 not out. England won by five wickets.

Whether the injury decided it is unanswerable and it is still discussed as though it were not. The fixture's longer history is in the guide to the Pakistan-England rivalry.

Dallas 2024

On 6 June 2024, at Grand Prairie Stadium in Dallas, Pakistan made 159 for 7 against the United States, who matched it exactly and won the Super Over 18 for 1 to Pakistan's 13 for 1. It was the first Twenty20 international between the two sides. Pakistan finished third in Group A with two wins from four and went out before the Super 8 stage.

The result was treated in the United States as a landmark and in Pakistan as a scandal, and both readings are defensible. What it exposed was structural rather than freakish: a batting order still capable of making 159 on a good surface, and a bowling attack whose plan required the opposition to fold. In a format where a side can lose to anybody on a given afternoon, that combination will eventually meet a team that does not fold.

The domestic effect, and where the players came from

One feature separates Pakistan's Twenty20 international history from its record in the other formats: the domestic game caught up with the international side rather than lagging behind it.

Before 2016 Pakistan's twenty-over cricketers were produced by a national domestic competition and by the informal game, and they arrived at international level having never played in front of a crowd that mattered or against overseas professionals. After 2016 they arrived having done both, several times, and often having been coached by the same foreign specialists their opponents used. The change showed first in the fast bowlers, who learned to bowl the last over as a discipline rather than as an emergency, and then in the batting, where the idea that a total of 180 was normal rather than exceptional took hold within about three seasons.

It has not solved everything. A franchise league selects for the skills that win franchise matches, and Pakistan's persistent international weakness — a middle order that can accelerate from the eleventh over rather than the sixteenth — is one the league has not obviously fixed, because a franchise can buy an overseas player to fill that slot and a national side cannot.

What the record shows

Three finals, one title, four consecutive knockout appearances between 2007 and 2012, one spell at the top of the rankings, and two group-stage eliminations in the middle. Set against a Test and one-day record with much longer troughs, this is Pakistan's most consistent international record in any format.

The reasons are the ones this page has kept returning to. The country produces fast bowlers in volume — the resource the format values most — and it produces cricketers who learned to improvise before they learned to defend. What it has never produced reliably is the middle-order finisher, which is the position that decides the highest-quality Twenty20 matches, and which is why the record contains two finals lost by small margins rather than won.

There is one further pattern worth naming. The two finals Pakistan lost were both close — five runs at the Wanderers in 2007, five wickets at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 2022 — and in both, Pakistan had reached the last match having played better cricket across the preceding fortnight than the side that beat them. A knockout format does not care about the fortnight. That is the price of a game short enough for Pakistan to win from nowhere.

The domestic feed for all of this is the National T20 Cup and the franchise league, the captaincy churn across the period is traced in the history of the office, the global tournament context is in the T20 World Cup guide, and the rest of the country's cricket sits on the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Sources and method

Scores, dates, venues and margins on this page were checked against published match records and ICC tournament documentation before being written. The ranking date follows the ICC's own published rankings history; the calendar-year and partnership records quoted are those recorded as records at the time they were set. Overall Twenty20 international win-loss totals are not quoted here, because they change with every match. Judgements about why particular campaigns succeeded or failed are editorial, and nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.