Women's Domestic Cricket in Pakistan

Organised women's cricket in Pakistan is twenty years older than the country's franchise league, and for the first decade of its existence it was actively opposed rather than merely neglected. The team that played Pakistan's first women's international in 1997 had been assembled by two sisters who faced court cases and death threats for organising it. Thirty years later the board runs a national one-day competition, a Twenty20 competition, central contracts and a maternity policy. The distance travelled is larger than in almost any other cricketing country, and the structure at the end of it is still smaller than in almost any other.

The domestic game is the part of this story that gets least attention and explains most of it. Pakistan's women's international results have been modest — a small number of wins against the strongest sides, a good record against the tier below — and the reason is visible in the number of competitive matches a Pakistani woman plays in a season. It is a small fraction of what an Australian or English contemporary plays, and it has been for the whole of the programme's history.

This page describes what the domestic competitions actually are, how they have changed, and where the gaps sit.

1996: two sisters, a court case and death threats

Women's cricket was organised in Pakistan in 1996 by Shaiza and Sharmeen Khan, who set up an association and a team. The obstacles were not administrative. Government policy at the time restricted women from playing sport in public on religious grounds, the venture was met with legal challenge, and the sisters received death threats for pursuing it.

They pursued it anyway. Pakistan played their first women's one-day international against New Zealand in January 1997 and appeared at the World Cup in India later that year, losing all five matches and finishing last of eleven teams. That result is often quoted as evidence of how far behind the programme started. What it actually demonstrates is that a team existed at all, twelve months after being founded against active opposition, with no domestic competition beneath it.

The following years were complicated by a dispute between rival women's cricket associations, which affected which body could enter Pakistan in international tournaments and cost the players fixtures they could not afford to lose.

2005: the board takes over

The turning point was administrative. In 2005 the Pakistan Cricket Board established a women's wing with responsibility for all women's cricket in the country, ending the competing-associations problem and, for the first time, attaching women's cricket to an organisation with money and grounds. How that wing sits inside the wider organisation is described in the guide to PCB structure.

The immediate consequence was a domestic competition. Before 2005 there was essentially no organised women's cricket season in Pakistan; after it there was one every year.

The Fatima Jinnah Championship, and the departmental era

The board's first competition ran from the 2004-05 season and was later renamed the Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah National Women's Cricket Championship, after the stateswoman. It was a limited-overs tournament, fifty overs a side for most of its life, with a group stage feeding a second phase and a final. In its largest form it involved eighteen teams.

The composition of those eighteen is the interesting part, because it mirrored the men's game exactly. Regional sides — Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and others — played alongside departmental sides representing employers, of which Zarai Taraqiati Bank Limited and the Higher Education Commission were the strongest. ZTBL won seven titles, more than anyone; Karachi won four and Lahore two.

That structure carried the same advantages and the same problem it did in the men's competition. A departmental side meant an employer paying salaries for players who might otherwise have had to choose between cricket and work, which for women in Pakistan was a more binding constraint than for men. It also meant that a player's livelihood depended on a corporate payroll rather than on cricket revenue, and that the strongest team in the country was whichever bank had recruited most aggressively. The full argument is set out in the guide to the history of departmental cricket.

The championship's final season, in 2017, split into separate regional and departmental divisions with a winner in each, and then it was replaced.

Blasters, Challengers, Dynamites: the three-team model

From 2017-18 the board took a different approach entirely. Instead of eighteen teams of mixed strength, the fifty-over competition was reduced to three squads made up of the country's best players — the PCB Blasters, the PCB Challengers and the PCB Dynamites — playing a round-robin followed by a final. It began as the PCB Triangular One Day Women's Tournament and was renamed the Pakistan Women's One Day Cup from 2021-22. A fourth side, the PCB Strikers, was added in 2021-22 and removed again before 2022-23.

The Dynamites have been the most successful, winning in 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2022-23, with one title each for the Blasters and the Challengers.

The reasoning behind the change was straightforward and is the same reasoning applied to the men's first-class game in the regional cricket reforms: with a limited pool of genuinely competitive players, spreading them across eighteen sides produced fixtures that developed nobody. Concentrating them in three produced matches in which every player faced international-standard opposition.

The cost is equally straightforward. Three squads means a very small number of professional places, no promotion route from below, and nothing for a promising player in Quetta or Multan to be selected into except a national trial. A competition that concentrates the best players also removes the tier where the next generation would be found.

The Twenty20 side of the calendar

The Twenty20 competition followed a similar path. A Departmental T20 Women's Championship ran in 2018 and 2018-19; from 2019-20 the board replaced it with what began as the National Triangular T20 Women's Cricket Championship and became the PCB Women's Twenty20 Tournament, using the same Blasters, Challengers and Dynamites squads, with the Strikers added for 2022-23. The Challengers won the first two editions and the Blasters their first title in 2022-23. It runs alongside the one-day competition rather than in a separate window.

Fixtures are concentrated at a small number of venues, principally in Karachi and Lahore, which keeps costs down and means most matches are played at grounds like Gaddafi Stadium and the National Stadium rather than in the players' own cities.

The season, and who watches it

A women's domestic season in Pakistan runs inside the same narrow weather windows as the men's, which means it competes for the same grounds and the same groundstaff at the same time of year. In practice the women's competitions are scheduled in blocks of a fortnight or so, often with several matches at one venue on consecutive days, because moving three squads around the country repeatedly is not affordable. The venues themselves are covered in the guide to Pakistan's cricket grounds.

Attendance is small. Most matches are played in front of team staff, families and a handful of spectators, and the board's main distribution route is streaming rather than broadcast. That matters more than it sounds, because the argument for a franchise women's competition rests on an audience existing, and the evidence for that audience in Pakistan currently comes from the crowds at men's fixtures and from the growth in women's viewing figures elsewhere rather than from ticket sales at domestic women's matches. The composition and habits of Pakistani cricket crowds are discussed in the guide to fan culture.

Contracts, and the maternity policy

The board introduced central contracts for women players and has revised the number and the value repeatedly. In June 2019 it cut the number of contracted players from seventeen to ten while increasing what each was paid — a decision that says a good deal about the trade-off the programme has always faced between depth and viability.

The single most significant policy change came in 2021. Bismah Maroof, then captain, became the first Pakistani cricketer to use the board's parental support policy, taking leave in April 2021, giving birth in August, and returning to captain Pakistan at the 2022 World Cup with provision made for her child and a carer to travel. It was the first policy of its kind in Pakistani cricket and one of the earlier ones in the game anywhere. Whatever else the programme has failed to do, that was a genuine piece of institutional progress and it was made on the initiative of the board rather than under external pressure.

The players the system produced

Two careers frame the whole period.

Sana Mir was the off-spinner and captain around whom Pakistan's women's cricket was organised for a decade, and she remains among the leading wicket-takers in the country's one-day history with more than 150 ODI wickets. She was also, for a long stretch, the only Pakistani woman cricketer whose name was widely known at home, which is its own kind of burden.

Bismah Maroof captained Pakistan across two spells between 2013 and 2023 and holds a genuinely unusual world record: more runs in women's one-day internationals than any other player has made without scoring a century. She led Pakistan to a 3-0 series win over Sri Lanka in 2018, was injured mid-tournament at the 2020 T20 World Cup, and handed the captaincy to Nida Dar in March 2023. Her domestic List A record — approaching six thousand runs across more than two hundred matches — is the clearest evidence available that the domestic competitions, small as they are, have produced volume for the players who stayed in them.

Nida Dar, Javeria Khan, Diana Baig, Sidra Ameen, Aliya Riaz and Fatima Sana all came through the same competitions. The pool is small enough that most of the names in a Pakistan squad have played with and against each other since their teens.

What is missing

Three things, and none of them is a mystery to anyone inside the game.

The first is volume. A three-team competition in two formats produces a small number of matches a season. Players in Australia, England and India play multiple competitions with promotion and relegation beneath them and a franchise league on top, and the gap in match hours compounds every year.

The second is a pathway. The men's game has an age-group ladder at under-13, under-16 and under-19 feeding regional sides, described in the guide to the under-19 pathway. The women's equivalent is thinner and less consistently run, which means the route into the three central squads depends heavily on trials and on being noticed.

The third is a franchise competition. Every other major women's programme now has one, and it is the mechanism by which players in those countries earn enough to make cricket a full-time occupation. Pakistan has staged women's exhibition fixtures alongside the Pakistan Super League and the board has discussed a full women's league repeatedly; the constraint is the same one that closed the men's junior league after a single season, which is money rather than intent.

The broader growth of the women's game internationally, and where Pakistan sits within it, is covered in the explainer on women's cricket growth. The rest of the Pakistani game is on the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on PCB competition records and announcements for the domestic tournaments, teams and contract changes described, published records of the National Women's Cricket Championship and its successors, and documented accounts of the founding of women's cricket in Pakistan in 1996 and the first internationals in 1997. Career records for the players named are quoted from published international and domestic career records, and where two sources give slightly different aggregates the figure is described in general terms rather than stated precisely. The assessment of what the structure lacks is editorial. Nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.