Niazi closes out Karachi win against Lahore
Lahore Qalanders missed a chance to go top of the Pakistan Super League as Irfan Khan Niazi hit an unbeaten 48 from 21 balls to seal a four wicket win for Karachi Kings in a rain-affected game.Chasing a revised target of 168, Niazi struck five sixes in the final three overs of the Karachi innings, including one to finish the match with three balls to spare.Having been put into bat, Lahore's openers raced to 90 before the dismissal of Mohammad Naeem (65) in the eighth over, after which the players were forced off.When play resumed Fakhar Zaman pushed on to 51, but Lahore lost a flurry of wickets as they hurried to set a score in a reduced 15 overs a side game.Abbas Afridi took 4-27 while five Lahore batters were out for single figures as the home side finished on 160-8.Karachi openers David Warner and Tim Seifert both made 24 in the reply, while James Vince was caught at long-off off Rishad Hossain for 13.When Khushdil Shah was the fifth wicket to fall, caught by Naeem off Haris Rauf for nine, Karachi needed 52 from 22 deliveries. Niazi and Mohammad Nabi (15) responded with a 45-run partnership, and while Nabi was caught tamely from the first ball of Daryl Mitchell's final over, his batting partner hit the remaining seven runs required to close out the victory.Karachi move above their opponents into third, level on points with second-place Islamabad United, while Lahore remain two points off leaders Quetta Gladiators but with a superior net run-rate.Scorecard, PSL fixtures & results, table
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The Guardian
30-05-2025
- The Guardian
Have bat, will travel: Raza and cricket's wanderers follow in footsteps of WG Grace
Do you remember the first of Zimbabwe's three ODIs against Bangladesh in 2022? No? Let me refresh your memory. Bangladesh's batters had racked up 303 for two. Zimbabwe had lost both openers by the end of their second over. They were 62 for three when Sikandar Raza came to the crease. He scored 135 of the 240 runs the home side needed and Zimbabwe won with nearly two overs to spare. Raza rescued them in the ODI that followed, too – another century – and ended up top-scoring in Zimbabwe's first series win in three years. The then 36-year-old put his determined spirit down to his training in the Pakistan Air Force: 'I couldn't become a fighter pilot,' he said, 'but I think, as a person, I will always be a fighter.' Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week's action after newsletter promotion There's plenty of dash about him – but this week it was literal. On Saturday afternoon he was scoring a half-century for his country in a Test match against England at Trent Bridge. Twenty-four hours later he was hitting the winning runs at the Pakistan Super League final in Lahore. The journey – he flew economy – included a near 100-mile drive between the Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports. Next time he should borrow an F-16. Raza's feat has raised cheers and eyebrows in equal measure. For some – especially delighted Lahore Qalandars fans – it is the ultimate heroic expression of club commitment. For others it is one more harbinger of a cricket calendar ready to collapse from franchise overload (it's worth noting that the all-rounder had already forgone this year's Tests against Ireland and Bangladesh for his PSL commitments). Imad Wasim, who played for more franchise teams than any other player in 2023 and 2024, summed up Raza's decision thus: 'If you're getting paid, you'll go.' Concerns are understandable. The fixture crush (and sums on offer) leave players subject to temptation and the matches themselves open to abuse. Sri Lanka Cricket were certainly unimpressed earlier this year by the behaviour of Dasun Shanaka, whose first-class side, Singhalese Sports Club, had recalled him from the ILT20 league in Dubai. You might argue that the all-rounder had done all he could on his mercy mission to help them avoid relegation, hitting 123 off 87 balls at No 7. By the time he was out, mid-morning on day three, he'd dragged SSC back into contention. And then, at lunchtime, he vanished from the ground. A concussion substitute had been agreed after he was hit playing a sweep shot, which made it even stranger when he showed up that night in Dubai, a four-and-a-half-hour flight away, batting for his ILT20 team. His 34 off 12 deliveries helped Dubai Capitals to victory and never has a doctor's note seemed more convenient. Shanaka insisted that he had told SSC he was leaving early, but Sri Lanka Cricket still fined him $10,000. But it's easy to shake heads, wag fingers and ignore that this dilemma is as old as the sport itself. Overlapping obligations are baked into cricket's history, including one of its greatest origin stories of all. WG Grace did not live in an era when he could jump in a jumbo and race above the clouds to his next fixture, but he did a good job of maximising the rail and stagecoach routes. On Friday 11 August 1876, MCC had been asked to follow on in their second innings against Kent and Grace's next game for Gloucestershire was already in the back of his mind. 'As I had to play at Bristol the following Monday, and did not think we could save the match, I meant to get home as soon as possible. Consequently I opened my shoulders to the bowling.' Talk about unintended consequences: hHe had hit a hundred by the close and spent Saturday racking up the first triple-century in first-class cricket. It took him most of Sunday to get back from Canterbury. He opened the batting against Nottinghamshire on Monday morning and scored 177 (including an all-run seven). After taking eight wickets on the Wednesday he headed out to bat the following day at Cheltenham, and finished with another triple-century. Those 839 runs in eight days were the beginning of his legend. In 1962, Garry Sobers was determined to squeeze in every innings he could as South Australia's 'guest player'. Due to play in West Indies's first Test against India on Friday 16 February, he spent the Monday compiling 251 in a Sheffield Shield match against Richie Benaud's New South Wales, and the Tuesday taking six for 72 to secure the game. The 55-hour journey from Adelaide to Trinidad was one of the longest flight routes in existence – and Sobers just made it on to the field. And what of Graham Gooch? He, too, was determined to give his all both to club and country in 1988, when the fifth and final day of the Sri Lanka Test clashed with the opening day of Essex's title-chasing match against Surrey. Happily, both matches were in London. Unhappily, England failed to wrap up their game at Lord's before lunch as they should have done. Essex, fielding only 10 men, watched Darren Bicknell and Alec Stewart put on a century partnership at the Oval as Gooch sweated in the Lord's turret. Even worse, when England did finally get the single run they needed for victory, the presentation was delayed because the BBC, who insisted on showing it live, was waiting for Neighbours to finish. It just goes to show that – to paraphrase St Paul – while all things are possible, they're not all profitable. That was certainly the conclusion Sunil Narine came to when contemplating the 9,000-mile round trip between Dallas and Birmingham required to get him from Major League Cricket to the Vitality Blast finals day two summers ago. Perhaps Shakib Al Hasan learned it too, after flying all the way to the UK for a single championship game last September and finding himself with a ban for an illegal bowling action. Time to think global, play local …
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- The Guardian
‘Red-ball cricket is the soul of the game': Kane Williamson joins Middlesex
The world's third-best Test batsman has made a quiet arrival in London for the beginning of a four-month stint in county cricket. Middlesex made headlines recently by saying they were keen to sign Virat Kohli. Maybe next year. This one, they've got his friend and contemporary Kane Williamson who, with his gear stuffed into a Karachi Kings kit bag, was picked up from the airport by his new captain, Steve Eskinazi, on Wednesday morning then went straight to training on the Nursery Ground before the game against Sussex in the Blast on Thursday night. Williamson should do plenty for Middlesex's middle order, but maybe not quite so much for the viewing figures their live stream brings in on the subcontinent. Still, it feels like a coup for county cricket. It has been made possible by the support of MCC, who are paying a part of the 34-year-old's fee so that he can double up playing for London Spirit in the Hundred. To commit to spending the summer in England, Williamson has had to turn down another central contract with New Zealand, who are going on tour in Zimbabwe in July and August. Instead, he says, he will continue the arrangement he has had for the past 12 months, where he is available to play for the national team without being obliged to when their fixtures clash with other commitments. 'It worked well last year, and obviously I'm in close conversations with New Zealand cricket, and the relationship is strong, but the landscape's changing really fast.' Williamson is in the odd position of being a part of their team, and apart from their team. 'Yeah, we're still learning how to do it,' he says. 'The landscape keeps changing with the different challenges that we're presented with as cricketers. It's a work in progress. But New Zealand Cricket have been great to work with on it, I've been fortunate with that.' To be blunt, the economics of the game mean they don't have much choice. Williamson, so adept at pacing an innings, is trying to work out how best to thread his way through the years he has left in the game he plays so well. Eleven years ago, his compatriot Martin Crowe named Williamson, Kohli, Joe Root and Steve Smith the 'Fab Four' in a famous article for ESPN Cricinfo. All these years later Kohli – who is 36 – has just become the first of them to announce his retirement from Test cricket, a decision which, Williamson says, caused him to do a little reflective thinking himself. 'My first thought was 'oh gosh, there's an end point',' he says. 'Because before that, you're on the journey, there's a pursuit there. And it's not connected to those other three, but we've all been playing at the same time, and we've all competed against each other for a long time and we all know each other pretty well. So then you do start to reflect a little bit. I know Virat pretty well, we've chatted a lot over the years, but you do realise that we're not just cricketers as well, we're human beings and your life situation changes.' Unlike Kohli, Williamson still wants to play red-ball cricket. But he also has a young family to look after. They have come over with him. 'Summer's always got a nice buzz here in the UK and especially in London, so it's great to call it home for a few months.' You guess it makes a welcome change from making an itinerant living on tour, or the T20 circuit. He is looking forward to playing four or five championship matches. He says the competition helped make him into the player he is. 'I know I really valued my time in England actually playing county cricket as a young player, getting exposed and having to learn. You're just constantly having to try and work things out but getting so many opportunities to do it. Whereas in most other parts of the world you're playing half as many games a year. Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week's action after newsletter promotion 'The opportunities now are vast and that's an amazing thing. But my passion was for the red-ball game, that was the pinnacle, and that's where my aspirations were, growing up,' he says. 'I guess on the other side, you have the white-ball formats and they come and they go pretty quickly and there's so much of it going on, which presents a lot of fantastic opportunities, but yeah, when I talk about the soul of the game I still see that as the red-ball cricket.' Go catch him at it if you can. It's not clear how many more who think, or play, the same way will come along after he's gone.
Daily Mail
27-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Sikandar Raza saga shows the sinister trend haunting cricket's T20 franchise leagues - and the dangerous world it opens up
If you hadn't followed the story closely, you might have been surprised to tune in to the last few balls of this year's Pakistan Super League on Sunday evening, and see a guy at the crease called Sikandar Raza. After all, barely 24 hours earlier, a guy called Sikandar Raza had been scoring 60 for Zimbabwe against England at Trent Bridge. How many Sikandar Razas does cricket need?
