This is a big season of cricket for Pakistan, an unprecedented season in some ways. They play nine Tests, the most in a season since 1998-99. They host three bilateral Test series in a season, which they haven't done before. They host an ICC event for the first time since 1996. Their two main grounds are undergoing the biggest upgrades since practically forever. And the PSL becomes the first league to go head-to-head against the IPL next year. It all feels a little bit seismic.
It is also a big season for Babar Azam, their premier batter and, until recently, the biggest star in the Pakistan game and unquestioned leader of all three national men's sides. But in the last year some of that authority has gone. He's no longer the all-format captain. He remains their T20 captain, though even that isn't guaranteed.
He doesn't quite command the team as he once did, and in Shaheen Afridi, for one, different centres of power are emergent. Once, Babar presided over a happy and united dressing room; the one he is merely a member of now isn't quite as shiny, happy or smiley as the social media posts want you to believe.
Above all, though, and far more a matter for concern, is that some of the lustre has slipped from his batting, whence his authority primarily flowed from. In T20s, the debate around his batting is an old and tiresome one. ODIs don't matter, until they do. It is, instead, in Tests where a sharp dip in productivity has really hit home. It has also passed, by and large, unnoted.
Which is strange because the numbers are pretty stark. From the start of 2019 until December 2022, Babar averaged nearly 60 in Tests. In that time, he averaged over 50 in Australia, nearly 50 in England and West Indies, nearly 70 in Sri Lanka, over 80 in Pakistan, and as if to troll the ZimBabar critics, only 1 against Zimbabwe. No statpadding here, thank you very much. Either the Fab Four needed to expand membership to include him, or someone within needed replacing.
Since then, though, he's been averaging a far more ordinary 37.41. This run includes a solitary hundred and three fifties in nine Tests. In his last Test series, in Australia, he averaged 21, his lowest in a series (excluding the Zimbabwe series of 2021) since 2017-18, well before he had established himself in the side.
It's not that he has looked out of form exactly, but it's also true that he has rarely looked invulnerable. The Australia series is a great illustration of this. He got starts in five out of six innings, working really hard for them, but ultimately he could manage a highest of only 41. Four out of the six dismissals were to balls that hit like jaffas at first but which, upon reflection, revealed in Babar's batting a lingering carelessness to incoming deliveries. Three of the six were bowled or leg-before, a mode of dismissal that is, perhaps, a thing.
In that run between 2019 and 2022, Babar was dismissed leg-before or bowled 11 times in 41 innings. Since then, it is eight times in 17 innings, nearly double the rate. Previously, it appeared to be a flaw only against left-arm spin, responsible for six of those 11 dismissals. In this recent run, more than half of those dismissals are to right-arm pace (and a couple of lbws to left-arm spin suggest that remains an issue).
And there are the unconverted starts. His scores since the 161 against New Zealand in Karachi in December 2022 are, in order: 14, 24, 27, 13, 24, 39, 21, 14, 1, 41, 26, 23. The consistency of those failed starts is uncanny.
It's difficult to put a finger on why it's happening. Is it to do with his concentration, that he gets set but is increasingly prone to lapses in it? It does bring to mind an early glitch in his Test career, of getting out around breaks.
Pakistan's Test schedule, and more specifically the gaps between Tests, can't be helping. The first Test against Bangladesh will be Pakistan's - and Babar's - first since January in Australia. Those Tests, in turn, were their first for five months, since a series in July 2023 in Sri Lanka. And those Tests were their first in six months. By contrast, between January 2021 and December 2022, their longest gap between Tests was about four months.
Long-form batting needs regular release. It works to a constant rhythm. Pakistan's recent Test schedule has been so arrhythmic (and after the Tests against West Indies in January 2025, they don't play another for ten months), it isn't easy, even for someone of Babar's gifts, to dance to this irregular beat. And schedules as they are mean he hardly gets to play any domestic first-class cricket in the interim: his last such game was the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy final in December 2019.
The off-field dysfunctions of his employers can't have been helpful, the churn of board and coaching regimes. He is not an especially articulate or expressive personality publicly, and he hasn't spoken about being removed from the captaincy after the 2023 World Cup. In any case, the PCB will hardly allow for such a public venting, not least because of their own role in building him up to that stature in the preceding years.
But who knows how much being dumped so suddenly as captain - that too by one of the all-time clown PCB administrations under Zaka Ashraf - jolted him? We're talking here of an almost unparalleled tenure by Pakistan standards: in the modern age (excluding Abdul Kardar), only Misbah-ul-Haq has been captain longer without (anything but temporary) interruption, and that too wasn't across all formats like Babar. He'd seen off multiple board chairmen, lived through various coaches, through losses and wins alike, across four unchallenged years. Who knows how much that removal shook his core equanimity, or the equilibrium that had once developed in the dressing room under him? He's never struck one as a proactive or imaginative captain but equally he - or his batting - rarely seemed burdened by it.
He now has nine Tests ahead of him, a rare uninterrupted sequence of long-form cricket, and the comfort of home surfaces in seven of them. No captaincy as distraction (though neither, perhaps, as motivation); challenges against left-arm spin to overcome, quality pace to repel; a return to South Africa, where he first served notice of his Test quality; a high-profile series against England. All in all, it is the perfect platform on which to refresh, to reset. Nine Tests to distance himself from the doom and gloom and stagnancy of the last 18 months or so, and to move closer to where he really should be.