A few weeks ago, in these very pages, I had implored the decision makers within Pakistan cricket to exercise patience and stick with a struggling Test squad. Within hours of publication, the PCB instead chose a of the team and coaching staff.

In light of that, I am not interested in offering any advice around the subject of this article. Yes Sahibzada Farhan is captain of Pakistan’s T20 side for now, and yes his first series as captain saw him break the world record for most runs in a three-match Full Members series. In fact, with each innings ending above a 160 strike rate, he combined explosiveness with consistency, a completely rare feature for Pakistani batters. But despite these achievements, both the long- and short-term reading of Pakistani cricket history suggests that change could come at any time.

However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t savour the success that led to Sahibzada becoming skipper, because it represents a story that goes against two of the most popular cliches about Pakistan cricket.

The first cliche was best represented by Razaullah, one of the debutants in that post-implosion team referred above. The mononymed pacer’s raw speed and booming sixes at once recalled the romantic ideal of the unknown, talented youngster who serves as the basis of mythmaking in Pakistani cricket.

But watching him bowl also brought up memories of Pakistan’s failure to develop similarly hyped and talented youngsters like the Shahs Naseem and Shaheen. And that’s the second cliche – how Pakistan cricket inevitably ruins the exciting talent at its disposal.

In light of these two foundational cliches, Sahibzada’s story offers a refreshing exception. Rather than an uncut gem bursting onto the scene before fading away, his ascension represents a reverse order of long, diligent effort resulting in sustainable success.

The easiest way to show this is with two very simple graphs, both from the PSL. The first shows his tournament strike-rate for each of the six events he’s played in, and the second shows the number of sixes hit in each PSL.

Tournament	Strike-Rate	Sixes hit
PSL '17/'18	116.66	4
PSL '18/'19	90.74	0
PSL '21/'22	102	1
PSL '23/'24	133.66	8
PSL '25	152.20	21
PSL '26	166.66	23

The major takeaways jump out immediately. After three middling PSLs where he never struck at higher than 116, he returned in the 2024 season with a big jump, and has improved his strike-rate by double digits in each of the subsequent three seasons. The difference is even starker when it comes to six hitting, where he had only five maximums in his first three seasons but has hit 44 in the last two.

As Sahibzada revealed during this year’s tournament, the catalyst for this change was advice from veteran international, and a frequent teammate at various levels of cricket, Iftikhar Ahmed. At the time, Sahibzada was out of international reckoning after a brief run in 2018, and had struggled to break back into the PSL as well. He had been scoring heavily in domestic competitions, and was angry and confused as to why that performance wasn’t enough to merit a return. It was around this time that Iftikhar advised him to drastically improve his strike-rate if he wanted to make a comeback. He argued that the country was chock-full of batters who could bat at a strike-rate of around 120-130, which meant that anyone consistently clearing that bar would make a strong case for selection.

Sahibzada later admitted that the advice initially caught him by surprise, and he even resented it. “I did not like him saying that and found it odd that he was criticising my low strike rate.” Iftikhar’s words were echoed by Abdur Rehman, one of the region’s most influential coaches, but again, Sahibzada resisted. “I did not truly understand the logic behind it and thought that being the leading run-scorer [in the domestic National T20 competition] should be significant in itself.”

To observers of the T20 game, Sahibzada’s resistance might seem surprising, given the rapid evolution of power-hitting in the game. But I think we can understand his resistance both in the logic of athletes in general, and of Pakistani batters in particular. Athletes tend to have a very high regard of their own abilities, which makes sense because it is a prerequisite for being able to push themselves like they do. But it also means that they bristle at unsolicited advice.

Pakistani batters in particular tend to be very indignant about any suggestions they change. For many of them, the conventional measures of runs, rather than the new-age obsession with rates, is the only way to be judged. If you’re old enough, you would remember the agonising over Misbah-ul-Haq’s side and why it batted so slowly. If you’re younger, you’re aware of the interminable debate over Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan’s strike-rates.

But I wanted to bring up Ahmed Shahzad here, only because he is one of Sahibzada’s heroes. (Sahibzada rated him above Sachin Tendulkar in one viral video). Shahzad was the poster child of a stubborn refusal to evolve, being one of countless Pakistani batters who stuck resolutely to their 120 strike rates in T20s. Despite his , you could still find him on TV complaining that he had been deliberately kept out of the PSL after being unpicked in the draft. (He has also for this treatment.)

In light of this influence, the similarly good-looking Sahibzada’s decision to put his head down and evolve into a much more explosive batter was a stunning refusal to embrace the victim-mindset so beloved of ex-cricketers. Rather than appearing on podcasts to rant and rave about injustices and bias, he got to work instead.

He retreated to his club ground in Peshawar, and working with his long-time coach, focused primarily on range hitting. Rather than batting in the nets, he would bat against his club’s bowlers out at the ground with a full field, and looked to hit as many sixes as he could. As he mentioned to the media, he took that mindset to every tournament as well, aiming to end it as the leading six-hitter rather than top run-scorer.

Within a couple of years, Sahibzada had made his comeback, returning to the national side and becoming a hot commodity within the PSL. No one has hit more sixes than him over the last three seasons in that competition. His rich vein of form has also carried over to the national side, where he has been the team’s since his return, all while striking above 140. Fittingly, he ended the last T20 World Cup as the team’s highest run-getter.

He has gone from being another identikit batter, churning out low-quality innings thinking they would be enough, to completely transforming himself into one of the most important players in the country, and captain of the national side. It is extremely likely that the PCB will find a way to take that role away from him sometime in the future, but even if they do, that should not detract from Sahibzada’s incredible journey.

After all, Sahibzada’s story is not about a teenaged prodigy lighting up the world before being snuffed out by mismanagement. It is not the story of a handsome star content to revel in mediocrity while outraging about conspiracies against him.

It is instead a story you come across far less often in Pakistan cricket – a story of someone who opened up their mind to constructive criticism, worked tirelessly at improving themselves, and arrived mid-career as a world class batter in a team perennially starved for one.

It is a story worth savouring.

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