Origin of Cricket in Pakistan: Roots to Test Status

Pakistan is the only Test-playing country whose cricket history begins before the country does. The clubs, the grounds, the colleges and a good number of the players existed for decades before 1947. What did not exist was a state to organise them, a board to represent them or a competition to hold them together. All three had to be built at speed, in a country dealing with the aftermath of partition, and the remarkable thing is how quickly it was done. Pakistan was granted Test status five years after independence and beat England at The Oval two years after that.

This piece covers the origins: how the game reached the cities of the north-west, who played it before partition, what the new board had to construct from nothing, and how the case for Test status was won. The national team's own record, from that first Test onward, is in our history of Pakistan cricket. Other national beginnings are collected in our cricket history section.

Cricket in the cities that became Pakistan

Cricket arrived in the north-west of the subcontinent the same way it arrived everywhere else in British India: with the army, the administration and the railways. It was played in cantonments long before it was played in schools, and by Europeans long before it was played by anyone else. The pattern described in our origin of cricket in India piece applies here too, because until 1947 this was the same cricketing country.

Two cities matter most. Karachi was a port, and ports get the game early. British residents formed clubs there in the nineteenth century, the Karachi Gymkhana among them, and the mix of trading communities in the city meant that cricket circulated well beyond the European clubs. Lahore was the administrative and educational capital of the Punjab, and its cricket came out of its institutions rather than its docks.

Lahore's colleges

The Lahore story is essentially a story about schools. Aitchison College, founded to educate the sons of the Punjab's princely and landed families, played cricket seriously. Government College Lahore and Islamia College produced players, teachers and administrators. The open ground at Lawrence Gardens, now Bagh-e-Jinnah, was the city's cricketing centre for generations, and remains a functioning ground.

The college route mattered because it created a supply chain. A boy who was good at Aitchison or Islamia would be seen, would be picked for a college side, and could progress to representative cricket without any club membership at all. This is why Lahore, a landlocked provincial capital with no particular commercial reason to be a cricketing city, produced cricketers in quantity for a hundred years.

Karachi, Sindh and the coast

Karachi's cricket had a broader social base earlier, in part because of the number of communities trading through the port and in part because the game was played in the open in a city that had space for it. Sindh entered the Ranji Trophy in its earliest seasons and competed as a first-class province. After 1947 Karachi's population expanded enormously with the arrival of refugees from India, including a large number of families from Gujarat and Bombay who brought serious cricketing backgrounds with them. The effect on the city's cricket was immediate and lasting.

Beyond the two big cities

It would be misleading to present Pakistani cricket as a Lahore and Karachi story alone, even at the start. Rawalpindi and Peshawar had garrison cricket for the same military reasons as everywhere else on the frontier. Multan and Bahawalpur had established local cricket cultures, and Bahawalpur was a princely state with a ruler who took the game seriously enough to fund it, which is why it was competitive from the moment there was a national competition to be competitive in.

Sialkot deserves a separate mention, for manufacturing rather than for playing. The city became one of the world's principal producers of sports equipment, including hand-stitched cricket balls, and has supplied gear to leagues and national teams across several continents. A country with a domestic industry making the equipment has a structural advantage that is easy to overlook: the game costs less to take up there than it does in places where every ball has to be imported.

Pre-partition first-class cricket in the north-west

By the 1930s the region had proper first-class cricket. Sindh and Northern India, the latter based in Lahore, played in the Ranji Trophy from its early seasons. Both were competitive sides rather than makeweights, and the standard of cricket in Lahore and Karachi in that decade was as high as anywhere outside Bombay.

Players from the region also featured heavily in the Bombay Pentangular, which organised its teams by community rather than by geography. The Muslims side in that tournament drew talent from the Punjab and Sindh as a matter of course, and for a young cricketer from Lahore the Pentangular was the largest stage available. That tournament's own history, and the arguments that eventually ended it, are covered on the India origin page.

The players who came before the country

A number of cricketers who were central to Pakistan's early years had already played high-level cricket, and in some cases Test cricket, for undivided India.

• Abdul Hafeez Kardar played three Tests for India on the 1946 tour of England, appearing as Abdul Hafeez. He later captained Pakistan in its first Test and became the dominant figure in its early administration.
• Amir Elahi and Gul Mohammad both played Test cricket for India and later for Pakistan, a distinction almost nobody else in the game's history shares.
• Mohammad Nissar, the fast bowler who opened the attack in India's first Test in 1932, was a Punjabi who settled in Pakistan after partition.
• Jahangir Khan played for India and for Cambridge, and his son Majid Khan and grandson Bazid Khan both went on to play for Pakistan, making one of the sport's longer family lines.
• The Ali brothers, Wazir Ali and Nazir Ali, were established India players from the Punjab before 1947.

The point is not merely genealogical. It means the new country did not start from nothing in playing terms. It started with men who had played first-class and Test cricket, knew the standard required, and understood exactly what an application for Test status would have to demonstrate.

Partition and a cricket structure divided

Partition in August 1947 divided the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. The movement of people that followed was vast and violent, and its consequences reached every institution in both countries, sport included. That is a matter of documented history rather than a cricketing footnote, and it should be stated plainly rather than glossed.

For cricket specifically, the practical effects were these. Two of the Ranji Trophy's first-class provinces, Sindh and Northern India, were now in a different country from the competition they had played in. Grounds, clubs and administrative records were split across a new border. Players were scattered. Some cricketers who had represented India settled in Pakistan; others moved the other way. There was no national governing body, no domestic competition, no international fixture list and no recognition from the sport's governing conference.

Everything had to be assembled at once, and the people doing it were, in most cases, the players themselves.

Building a board and a competition

The Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan was constituted in 1949, bringing together the regional associations of the new country. It was later renamed the Pakistan Cricket Board. From the start it operated with a closeness between administration and playing staff that would have been unusual elsewhere; Kardar, in particular, moved from captaining the side to running the board.

The board's first two tasks were obvious. It needed a domestic first-class competition, and it needed international opposition willing to visit.

The Quaid-e-Azam Trophy

The national first-class championship, named for Muhammad Ali Jinnah, began in the 1953-54 season. Bahawalpur won the first title. The competition has been restructured many times since, at various points based on regional associations, at others on departments and employers, and at others on a mixture of the two, but it has remained the country's premier first-class tournament throughout.

Its early importance was straightforward. Without a domestic competition there was no way to identify players, no way to give them regular cricket at a serious standard, and no evidence to put in front of selectors. Much of Pakistan's early cricket was played on matting rather than turf, which shaped the kind of bowlers the country produced: matting rewarded seam and cut, and it made accurate medium-fast bowling genuinely dangerous.

Departments, regions and a long-running argument

One feature of Pakistani domestic cricket appeared early and has never entirely gone away. Because there was little money in provincial associations, banks, airlines, railways and other large employers ran teams and employed cricketers. For decades this was how a Pakistani first-class player earned a living.

The arrangement was regularly criticised for producing meaningless fixtures in front of empty grounds, and regularly defended on the grounds that it fed families and kept players in the game. A major restructure in 2019 cut the first-class competition to a small number of provincial sides and removed the department teams, a change that was strongly contested and subsequently revisited. Anyone reading about Pakistani domestic cricket will encounter this argument in some form; it is roughly seventy years old.

Grounds for a new country

A Test nation needs venues, and Pakistan in 1947 had grounds but not stadiums. What existed were club and college grounds, adequate for first-class cricket and not designed for crowds of tens of thousands.

The National Stadium in Karachi opened in the mid-1950s and quickly became the country's fortress; Pakistan went an extraordinarily long time without losing a Test there. The Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, originally named Lahore Stadium, followed at the end of the decade and became the principal venue of the Punjab. Bagh-e-Jinnah, the old Lawrence Gardens ground, staged Test cricket in the earliest years before the larger venues were ready, and continued as a first-class ground long after. Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Multan and Faisalabad all developed Test-standard grounds over the following decades.

The physical character of these venues shaped the cricket played on them. Pitches in Pakistan were traditionally hard, dry and low, offering little to a bowler who relied on bounce and a great deal to one who could reverse the ball or bowl leg-spin with control. Outfields were often abrasive, which is a technical point with large consequences: a ball that roughs up quickly on one side is a ball that can be made to reverse swing. The most distinctive Pakistani contribution to bowling technique grew directly out of the surfaces the country happened to have.

The men who made the first team

The early Pakistan side was small, close and led by one man with unusual authority.

Abdul Hafeez Kardar had played for India, for Oxford University and in county cricket, and he brought a set of expectations that were not negotiable. He captained Pakistan in every Test of its first six years, and he was as much an institution-builder as a cricketer. Contemporary accounts of his captaincy describe discipline enforced with little patience for dissent. Whatever one makes of the method, it produced a side that punched far above the age of its cricket board.

Fazal Mahmood was the bowler around whom everything was built. A police officer by profession, he bowled fast-medium with a leg cutter that was close to unplayable on matting, and he shouldered enormous workloads because there was no alternative. Hanif Mohammad, still a teenager when Pakistan gained Test status, was the batting equivalent: a small, technically immaculate opener with an appetite for occupation that would shortly produce one of the longest innings in the game's history.

Around them were players like Imtiaz Ahmed behind the stumps, Waqar Hasan, and Kardar's fellow migrants from Indian first-class cricket. It was not a deep squad. It did not need to be. Pakistan played very little cricket in its first decade, which meant the same eleven or twelve men could carry it.

The case for Test status

Recognition was not automatic. Pakistan had to demonstrate, to the Imperial Cricket Conference and particularly to MCC, that its cricket was of Test standard. It did so through a short series of tours.

The decisive one came in 1951-52, when an MCC side toured Pakistan. It was not a full England team, but it was a strong party, and Pakistan beat it in Karachi. That result, achieved by a country barely four years old, was the evidence the application needed. Pakistan had also toured India unofficially, giving further indication of the standard.

Test status was granted at the conference in July 1952. The first Test followed almost immediately, in October 1952, at the Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, against India, with Kardar captaining. The speed of that sequence is worth registering. Fewer than five years separated a country's creation from its first Test match, and the first Test was played against the country it had been created out of.

Where Pakistan went from there is the subject of our history of Pakistan cricket: the first win at Lucknow, the Oval victory of 1954, Hanif Mohammad, reverse swing, and everything that followed.

Cricket's place in a new country

It is easy to assume, looking backwards, that cricket was always Pakistan's national game. It was not, at least not in the way it later became. For the first few decades after independence, hockey had a strong claim. Pakistan's hockey team was among the best in the world through the 1950s and 1960s, won Olympic gold, and delivered international success at a time when the cricket side played only a handful of Tests a year and had no regular fixture list at all.

Cricket's advantage was that it was played everywhere, cheaply, on any available surface, and that it was covered by newspapers and later by radio in a way that built familiarity with names and reputations. When Pakistan started winning consistently, it had a ready-made national audience. The tipping point came later than the origin period covered here, and the 1992 World Cup finished the job, but the base was laid in these early decades of college cricket, department teams and street games.

A short timeline

Period	What happened
Nineteenth century	Garrison, club and college cricket established in Lahore, Karachi and the cantonment towns
1930s	Sindh and Northern India compete in the Ranji Trophy; regional players feature in the Bombay Pentangular
1947	Partition; the cricket structure of the north-west is separated from India's
1949	The Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan is constituted
1951-52	Pakistan beats a touring MCC side in Karachi
July 1952	Test status granted
October 1952	First Test match, against India at Delhi
1953-54	First season of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, won by Bahawalpur

What the origin period established

Several features of Pakistani cricket that people treat as national characteristics were in fact set in these first years.

Fast bowling as the national craft. Matting pitches, and later hard, dry, low-bouncing turf, put a premium on bowlers who could move the ball off the seam and through the air at pace. Fazal Mahmood was the first of the type. He was very far from the last.

Cricket as an urban school and college game. The Lahore and Karachi college systems were the main production line, and remained so long after independence. Pakistan's talent identification has always been informal, personal and reliant on someone influential noticing a boy in a club or college match.

Administration close to the playing side. Former players ran Pakistani cricket from the beginning, which brought expertise and a certain volatility in equal measure.

Improvisation. A board built in two years, a first-class competition built in five, and a Test side assembled from men who had learned their cricket in another country. That is not a criticism. It is why Pakistan became competitive faster than any other new Test nation.

A rivalry that arrived fully formed. Most cricketing rivalries take decades to acquire meaning. Pakistan's first Test opponent was India, and the fixture carried the entire weight of partition from the first ball. Neither side had to build the significance; it was there before the cricket was. That has made the fixture unlike any other in the sport, subject to long interruptions for reasons that have nothing to do with cricket, and disproportionately intense when it does take place. India's side of the same story runs through our history of Indian cricket.

None of this was inevitable. A new state with far larger problems than sport could reasonably have taken twenty years to field a Test side, or never fielded a competitive one at all. That it took five years, and that the side was beating England within seven, is the achievement of a small number of people who had played the game at a high level and refused to accept that their new country should start at the bottom.

Every cricketing country's beginning has a different shape. Australia's grew out of settler colonial society and produced a first Test within a few decades, as our origin of cricket in Australia piece describes; England's was a slow evolution from village and gambling cricket, covered in origin of cricket in England; Sri Lanka's ran through the mission schools of Colombo, and Bangladesh's began, in a sense, in the same pre-partition cricket culture described here before diverging entirely. Pakistan's distinction is compression. Almost everything happened at once.

For the fixture that started international cricket in the first place, see our Ashes section; for the tournament that eventually gave Pakistan its most famous night, our World Cup history. Career records for the modern generation are on our player pages, selection debates are the business of our playing XI tool, and if you want to check how much of the above you already knew, there is our cricket quiz.