Babar has not played a domestic first-class match since 2019, and he asked the PCB to find him a team

The interesting part of Babar Azam’s return to domestic first-class cricket is not that it is happening. It is who asked for it. Babar went to the PCB and requested a team, and the board arranged one, which is a different situation from a board ordering a senior player to go and find some red-ball cricket.

He will play for Oil and Gas Development Company Limited in the President’s Trophy Grade 1, signed as a guest player. It is his first domestic first-class cricket since December 2019.

Six years and eight months

The last one was a good one. Babar captained Central Punjab to an innings-and-16-run win over Northern in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy final at the National Stadium in Karachi, played across 27–30 December 2019. Central Punjab do not exist any more.

Even in that season he played only two domestic first-class matches, because Pakistan were touring Australia and then hosting Sri Lanka for the first Test series staged in Pakistan since 2009. Two was still a high-water mark. He rarely played more than one first-class match in a domestic season after 2015.

The numbers behind the request

Babar has not made a Test hundred since 26 December 2022, when he scored 161 against New Zealand in a drawn Test in Karachi. That was his ninth, and it closed a year in which he made 1,184 Test runs.

Since the start of 2023 he averages 30.43 in Tests, 12.55 below his career figure. He has eight fifties in 39 innings across that period, and inside it there is an 18-innings run in which he never passed 41. Four of the eight fifties have arrived in his last five Tests, which reads either as a batter climbing out of it or as a batter who has worked out how to reach 50 and no further.

His highest score in the drought is 88, in the second Test against West Indies at Queen’s Park Oval in August. He put on 183 with Abdullah Shafique, and then Brandon King ran him out with a direct hit from short cover, twelve short. Pakistan won that match by eight wickets for their first away Test victory in three years, drew the series 1-1, and made Babar joint player of the series. He still did not get the hundred.

What England did

Then came the three Tests in England, which Pakistan lost 3-0. Babar missed the opener at Headingley with an injury and returned for Lord’s and Edgbaston, where England’s quicks went at him with the short ball and got what they were after. His technique has been public property in Pakistan for a while, pulled apart on television most weeks by men who used to bat for the country. England did not start that conversation. It made it a great deal louder.

The side he is joining

OGDCL finished bottom of the eight-team President’s Trophy last season and were relegated. They are in this year’s competition only because the PCB removed WAPDA and Sahir Associates for failing to meet the season’s regulations, which opened two places up.

Their first round has not gone well. Against PTV, in a tournament that began on 12 September, they followed on and finished day three 132 behind with three wickets down. They are also missing their regular captain, Imam-ul-Haq having been withdrawn from the squad after failing a fitness test.

Babar was not in any of the eight squads when the PCB published them last week. He is being inserted mid-tournament, into a side that is already a round behind.

Whether it works is a separate question

He is not the only international in the competition, and the PCB’s central contracts now oblige Test players to turn up for a set number of first-class matches each year. But Babar was under no quota pressure here. He was not in a squad at all, and he asked to be put in one.

Pakistan are ninth in the ICC Test rankings and bottom of the World Test Championship table. Four days for a relegated department side will not move either number. What it can do is put a batter who has not made a Test hundred in nearly four years back in front of a red ball with nothing riding on the innings, which is the one thing international cricket has stopped offering him.

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