Wasim Akram asked what batter the PSL has produced in ten years, on the day Pakistan lost 3-0
Wasim Akram reached for a 15-year-old Indian batter to make his point about the Pakistan Super League, a few hours after England completed a series sweep at Edgbaston. His actual proposal had very little to do with the PSL.
Sep 12, 2026
Wasim Akram spoke to reporters in Lahore on Saturday and asked a question that has been sitting under Pakistan cricket for a decade. “It has been 10 years since the PSL started, but has a single batter been produced by the PSL? Yes we have produced a few bowlers but tell me have we produced any noteworthy batting talent.”
He picked his timing, or the fixture list picked it for him. A few hours earlier at Edgbaston, England had knocked off 130 in 24.2 overs to win the third Test by eight wickets and take the series 3-0.
The bowlers are the part nobody argues about
Akram is not wrong about the first half of his own question. Pakistan’s fast-bowling supply line has been the one thing in their cricket that kept working while everything around it was being rebuilt. Lahore Qalandars set up their Players Development Program in 2016, ran open trials, and out of the 2017 intake came Haris Rauf, a tape-ball bowler with no first-class cricket behind him who was in the national side inside three years. Zaman Khan and Dilbar Hussain followed through the same door. Shaheen Shah Afridi and Naseem Shah arrived by more conventional routes, but the franchise system is where they were hardened.
Nothing on the batting side reads like that. Pakistan have produced openers, and they have produced players who look the part for a season, but no batter has come out of the Pakistan Super League and turned into someone opposition teams plan around. That is the gap Akram was pointing at, and the scorecard at Edgbaston made the point for him.
What 3-0 actually looked like
Pakistan were bowled out for 133 inside 34 overs on the opening day of the final Test. England replied with 453. The second innings was better, and for a session it was much better: Shan Masood made 95, Babar Azam 76, and a debutant at No. 9 hit nine sixes to drag the lead out to 129. Then Joe Root made 62 not out, Jordan Cox 59 not out, and it was over by lunch on the fourth day.
One good second innings in a series does not undo three Tests. England’s sweep was their first in more than two years, and they got it against a side whose top order kept handing back the starts it earned.
The 15-year-old Akram used as the measuring stick
“I think when we produce a batting talent like the 14-year-old then we will see improvement coming through,” Akram said, and every Indian reader knows exactly who he meant. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi was 14 when Rajasthan Royals gave him an IPL debut in April 2025, and he became the youngest centurion in the tournament’s history that same season. On 4 July 2026 he played a T20I against England at 15, the youngest cricketer India have ever picked.
There is a wrinkle in using him as the example, though, and it cuts against the argument slightly. The IPL did not produce Sooryavanshi. Bihar did. He grew up in Tajpur in Samastipur district, went into an academy at nine, and had already played a Ranji Trophy match for Bihar at 12 years and 284 days by January 2024. The auction found him after all of that had happened. A franchise league is a shop window and an accelerator. It is not a nursery, and no T20 competition anywhere has ever behaved like one.
Which is more or less where Akram ended up himself.
His actual proposal is the unglamorous one
“Club cricket needs to be revived if we want improvement in red ball cricket,” he said. “The PCB should spend 100 million rupees each in Karachi and Lahore, as talent comes from club cricket.” He also asked for something Pakistani cricket has been constitutionally unable to give anyone: time. Leave the domestic structure alone for three or four years, he argued, and stop measuring it by the next series.
That is a harder sell than a headline about the PSL, because nobody gets credit for funding club cricket in Karachi and the results arrive long after whoever signed the cheque has moved on. Pakistan have gone through repeated restructures of their domestic game since 2019, each one presented as the fix. The one thing they have not tried is leaving a structure in place long enough to find out whether it works.
Akram has earned the right to say it, and he was saying it on a day when nobody in Pakistan cricket could argue back with a scoreboard.