The ghost of red ball cricket

Earlier today, Bangladesh's first 3-day First Class women’s cricket tournament kicked off, with 4 teams and 55 to 60 players participating. Last domestic season, India brought their first-class cricket tournament back, and it is now set to be a permanent fixture in their domestic calendar. Hypocaust reports that Zimbabwe too has held 2-day games for their women’s cricketers in recent times. You may also have watched or followed the many test matches Australia, England, India, and South Africa have played in the last couple of years. West Indies will soon join their ranks with tests scheduled vs Australia, England, and South Africa in the 2026-2029 cycle. You will note Pakistan is not mentioned here. Neither are recent World Cup winners New Zealand and current Asian champions Sri Lanka.

In this rather brief post, I will not demand that Pakistan Women play test cricket at the international level in the coming year: I know better than to ask this of the PCB. However, I think it’s time to talk about red ball cricket.

Pakistan Women played their last test match in 2004. The recent resurgence of red ball cricket has conveniently evaded us — and maybe you think that this is for the best, or that it doesn’t matter at all. After all, test matches are expensive, and we all know how the PCB feels about spending money on women’s cricket. Plus, you need not play them to qualify for a World Cup, which is pretty much how the PCB orients their women’s cricket calendar. So, if they’re expensive and not necessary, you may very well conclude that domestic first-class cricket is just as unnecessary. This is a narrative I’ve seen run rampant on social media: fans will have you believe that domestic red ball cricket is no good for teams that don’t play test cricket, and test cricket is no good for teams outside of the Big 3 (side-note: I love SA’s refusal to accept this rubbish). They say women’s cricket is all white ball, and those who want women’s teams to play first-class cricket are delusional or worse, not thinking in the best interests of the teams, but driven by their selfish desire to see their favourite players in whites.

This argument is easy to refute. I simply point naysayers towards Pakistan Women’s cricket team. Anyone who spends a week watching them play white ball match after white ball match notes that, 20 years after their last test match and with no test match in sight, still, the ghost of red ball cricket haunts this team.

It is visible in our failure to directly qualify for the real World Cups (2022 qualification not applicable here) or to win ODI series versus teams we should be evenly matched against, or better even, considering the monetary share Pakistan gets from the ICC. It is visible when in 50-over matches, our batters struggle to bat long and build innings and our bowlers struggle to bowl long and take wickets.

Batting and bowling averages by team in the 2022-2025 ODI Championship Cycle (as of 21 Dec 2024)

Look: if Pakistan was going to get better at ODIs by simply playing ODIs and one day domestic cricket, it would have happened already. Indeed, we are part of the ICC championship cycle and often find ourselves in the World Cup Qualifiers and then in World Cups too. That’s a fair amount of one day cricket — so why are we not getting better? There are several reasons, but I feel a lack of first-class cricket is a big one.

At the risk of sounding like an old-fashioned cricket-watcher, red-ball cricket teaches you lessons no other format can. You learn accuracy, grit, and the value of a good defence. What it means to absorb pressure and then to release pressure. How to play out a deadly opening spell for many more overs than you would ever have to in a white ball game. How to orchestrate wickets when nothing much is going on. How to earn a draw, or better yet, how to work for 4 days to get a win. How to read a bowler. How to read a batter. How to play cricket, really.

When I spoke to Fatima Sana a little over a year ago, I asked her which format she liked to bat in more, T20s or One Dayers. I had expected (perhaps foolishly) that she would say T20s. Fatima is still coming into her own as a batter but she’s very much a middle-order hitter, an impatient one too sometimes. She’s what they call a “busy player”: she shuffles around, comes down the track, runs hard, and tries anything to get the ball to the fence. I had figured this meant she would like T20s more because less ball do trick then why need more ball… or whatever the saying is. But she spoke about how she much preferred batting in one day matches. She said, the more time I get to spend on the crease batting, the happier I am and the better I get. In hindsight, this isn’t a surprising answer: Fatima isn’t the Asif Ali hit-em-and-go type. Even as a “hitter” for the team, she is a proper batter. And proper batters like to bat. Which means it’s a tragedy that before the one day tournament that’s taking place right now, she had last played a domestic one day match in September 2021. And as she ascends closer to the ranks of some of the great allrounders in women’s cricket, it is a bigger tragedy even, that she won’t get to experience the thrill and effort of scoring a century and taking a fifer in a first class match. And that we won’t get to see it.

Perhaps I should say this in a language more people will understand: have you seen the tweets saying first-class cricket has made Saim Ayub the ODI player he is? Or that Salman Agha’s success in the test team is what drives his ODI performances? Or that Shaheen should play a full first-class season to get back to his old self across formats? Or that Shadab’s downfall in white ball cricket is because of his negligence of red ball cricket?

I have.

What if we extended the same logic to their female counterparts?

Who’s to say Muneeba Ali wouldn’t be more successful at converting her 30s to 50s and her 50s to 100s once she’s learnt what it’s like to tough it out in the sun and truly earn her runs?

Or that Diana Baig won’t be an even better bowler when she’s worked her magic with the new ball and then tried her hand at reverse swinging with the old?

Or that Tuba Hassan’s lines and Nashra Sandhu’s lengths won’t be bettered when they have to send in ball after ball trying to land the same spot again and again?

Or that Pakistan as a unit won’t be a better team when they toil in the field from morning to evening day after day, learning what it means to earn your runs and earn your wickets?

First-class cricket for Pakistan women is not a selfish demand. I have seen what red ball experience does for players in this sport. We all have. And one way to exorcise us of our terrible ODI performances is to pay our respects to the truest form of cricket — at least at domestic level for now.