Six teams, three matches at home
The league expanded to six in its third season. The Multan Sultans franchise was sold in 2017 and entered a competition that had been built for five, which pushed the schedule from 24 matches to 34 and made the group stage a genuine double round robin. Multan won their first two, beating Peshawar Zalmi and then Lahore Qalandars by 43 runs, and finished the group stage in the middle of the table.
The bigger change was geographical. The 2017 season had brought one match to Pakistan. The 2018 season brought three: the eliminators at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore and the final at the National Stadium in Karachi, which had not staged a full international since 2009 and had been renovated for the purpose. Overseas players who agreed to travel were paid an additional 10,000 US dollars per match in the country. Tickets for the final sold out in three hours.
Ronchi's month
Islamabad United and Karachi Kings finished first and second. Islamabad won the Qualifier at a canter, chasing 155 in 12.3 overs, Luke Ronchi doing most of the damage. That took them straight to Karachi with a week off.
Peshawar Zalmi took the harder road. In the Eliminator at Lahore they defended 157 against Quetta Gladiators by one run, Hasan Ali taking the match award. Two days later, in a match cut to 16 overs a side, they beat Karachi by 13. Kamran Akmal, who had made 107 earlier in the tournament, took the award again.
Karachi, 25 March
Peshawar made 148 for 9 in the final. Islamabad, who had lost to them twice in the group stage, lost seven wickets in the chase but got there with 19 balls to spare, Ronchi's 52 from 26 the innings that settled it. It was Islamabad's second title in three seasons, and made them the first side to win the competition twice.
Ronchi finished with 435 runs, the most of the tournament, and both the final and tournament awards. Faheem Ashraf of Islamabad and Wahab Riaz of Peshawar each took 18 wickets, the leading mark; the league's own records list Faheem as the recipient of the wicket-takers' award.
Two bowling performances stood out from the group stage. Umar Gul, in the last season of a long career, took 6 for 24 for Multan Sultans against Quetta Gladiators. Shaheen Afridi, seventeen years old and in his first season for Lahore Qalandars, took 5 for 4 in 3.4 overs against the same side. Lahore finished last for the third time in three seasons; the bowler they had found would win them two titles before the decade was out.
Reported attendance across the tournament was just under 400,000, the highest of the four seasons played so far, and the three matches in Pakistan accounted for a disproportionate share of it.