Pakistani cricketer Fatima Sana’s first brush with captaincy got here beneath a long way from best cases.
Status in for then-captain Nida Dar, Sana walked as much as the batting wrinkle along with her workforce 4 wickets i’m sick for 35 runs in the second one fit of a one-day world (ODI) sequence in opposition to Unutilized Zealand in Christchurch.
The quick-bowling all-rounder grew to become the stream with a pivotal innings of 90 no longer out off 104 balls – hitting seven fours and a six – and helped Pakistan put up a goal of 221. With the ball in hand, she took the an important wickets of Unutilized Zealand’s important batter Amelia Kerr and captain Sophie Devine. However Pakistan misplaced the fit. 3 days then, Sana led Pakistan to their first-ever away win over Unutilized Zealand.
In Sana, Pakistan had inadvertently came upon a daring younger chief, in a position to converting the workforce’s fortunes along with her all-round abilities.
Ten months on, the 22-year-old will govern Pakistan on the ICC Girls’s T20 Global Cup within the United Arab Emirates.
“When the Pakistan Cricket Board spoke to me about taking on the captaincy [in August], my entire career flashed before me,” Sana advised Al Jazeera forward of the match.
“I thought about my humble beginnings, and cried when I broke the news to my family.”
It’s been a quick stand for Sana, who made her ODI and T20 world debuts as a 17-year-old in Might 2019, and reworked into the chief of Pakistan’s bowling assault. Her 84 wickets throughout 82 world suits are essentially the most for a Pakistani pacer since her debut.
.@imfatimasana named Pakistan captain for ICC Girls’s T20 Global Cup 2024 🚨
Our squad for the marquee tournament 🇵🇰#BackOurGirls pic.twitter.com/NWoF6RmyVH
— Pakistan Cricket (@TheRealPCB) August 25, 2024
A made from Karachi’s tape-ball boulevard cricket tradition
Sana’s cricket proceed started within the early 2000s in Karachi, Pakistan’s greatest city.
“I was around 10 years old when my brother taught me how to rotate my bowling arm,” she recalled. “I could not send the ball across the pitch so he asked me to run in and then bowl, and it worked.”
Cricket is essentially the most extensively performed recreation in Pakistan and maximum world cricketers – males or girls – get their first style of the sport at the streets. And Karachi – house to greater than 20 million population – is understood for its colourful tape-ball cricket scene, which comes to taking part in with a tennis ball coated with electrical tape – to extend its pace and make allowance better regulate when old on rugged neighbourhood streets.
Sana, too, is a made from Karachi’s decades-old boulevard cricket tradition.
Rising up as an ambitious swift bowler in Nazimabad, a well-known middle-class suburb in Karachi’s northwest this is referred to as the town’s breeding garden of cricketers, Sana first honed her abilities at the streets. Dozens of former world males’s cricketers, from mythical batter Hanif Mohamed to fresh captain Sarfaraz Ahmed, realized their craft in Nazimabad.
Sana’s first combatants, regardless that, have been slightly much less well-known.
The youngest of 5 siblings, she started through bowling to her used brothers and their pals.
“I have played a lot of street cricket with my brothers,” Sana mentioned, with a keenness for her siblings, and recalled how they might “fight with anyone who said I couldn’t play with them”.
The eldest, Shehroz Sana-ul-Haq, was once an ambitious cricketer himself however walked clear of the sport in pursuit of a “stable profession” upon his folks’ insistence. Then again, he took it upon himself to safeguard his sister lived her dream.
Shehroz taught Sana bowl swift, registered her at a neighborhood cricket academy and enrolled her in a zonal girls’s cricket match.
Nearest elderly 11, Sana was once the match’s youngest participant and stood out for her swift bowling.
“The girls were stunned and lifted me [in celebration] when I took my first wicket,” Sana laughed, recalling her first hard-ball cricket match that cleared the path to aggressive cricket.
All over the ones early days, some coaches urged Sana to modify to spin bowling at the pretext that ladies generally desire the slower mode of bowling. Then again, Sana, a James Anderson and Shoaib Akhtar fan, would have none of it.
Future Anderson’s regulate and swing left her in surprise, Akhtar’s generation driven her to bowl sooner.
Leap forward years
The ambitious pacer’s noteceable performances propelled her profession. She performed under-21 cricket on the past of 13 and senior home cricket two years then.
Her profession, regardless that, actually took off in 2019 when she was once picked through then-Pakistan captain Sana Mir for a home T20 championship. Sana took seven wickets in as many suits for the eventual champions and made her manner into the Pakistan workforce two months then.
“What impressed us [the selectors] the most about Fatima Sana was her desire to become a big player,” Marina Iqbal, former Pakistan cricketer and then-team selector, advised Al Jazeera.
“I discovered her keen to be informed from the skilled gamers – all the time stuffed with questions in regards to the sport.
“Her keenness to perform well for the team and herself made her stand out. Pakistan needed a player like her, so we backed her.”
Sana repaid the selectors’ religion with noteceable performances and received the PCB’s Rising Cricketer of the Month award in 2020.
A yr then, she went a step additional through successful the Global Cricket Council Girls’s Rising Cricketer of the Month award, changing into the primary Pakistani girl to get on an ICC honours listing.
The world reputation, and the performances in the back of it, opened the doorways to world Twenty20 franchise leagues within the Caribbean, Unutilized Zealand and Dubai.
Sana credit that publicity for serving to her develop as a global athlete.
“The players [from other countries] helped me identify my strengths and taught me how to improve as a cricketer,” she mentioned.
Alhumdullilah ❤️
It’s an absolute honor to obtain the trophy of @ICC Girls’s Rising Cricketer Of The Month.Onwards and upwards InshaAllah🤞🏼
Pakistan Zindabad 🇵🇰#iccawards2021 #icc #emergingcricketer #pcb #blessed pic.twitter.com/TPTtDiIp6p— Fatima Sana Khan (@imfatimasana) April 7, 2022
‘Lack of acceptance for women’s cricket’
Pakistan was once some of the earliest Asian international locations to go into girls’s world cricket, in 1997.
Its home cricket construction for girls is shiny years in the back of that for males and younger boys. There could also be a insufficiency of devoted girls’s cricket golf equipment to coach and nurture ambitious gamers.
The PCB runs regional cricket programmes by way of its academies for roughly 400 athletes in 8 towns throughout Pakistan however this is on the subject of it relating to amenities.
Aside from the academies, Sana believes girls do not need many choices relating to coaching.
“Coaches at native golf equipment aren’t able to whisk the accountability to coach ladies and allow them to compete with boys.
“There remains a lack of acceptance for women’s cricket.”
The PCB says it has greater its annual finances for girls’s cricket through greater than $600,000, however its girls’s home and world fixtures stay restricted.
The rustic nonetheless lacks a franchise-based T20 league, which Sana believes may trade in splendid publicity to next gamers.
Australia, England, Bharat, Unutilized Zealand and the Caribbean have their very own girls’s T20 franchise tournaments, which magnetize world stars and trade in native gamers a possibility to show off their talents.
In 2022, the board mentioned it could foundation a girls’s T20 league matching to the Pakistan Tremendous League for males, however shelved the speculation a yr then. It now holds an annual home T20 pageant that’s a a long way yelp from glitzy franchise occasions.
‘Ticks all the boxes as a captain’
Future it was once generation bowling that fast-tracked Sana’s profession, the all-rounder was once desperate to enhance her batting and was once inspired through former Pakistan head schoolteacher David Hemp in 2020. 4 years then, the effects are unmistakable.
Sana boasts the most efficient batting clash charge (128.78) and the second-best batting reasonable (34) amongst Pakistani batters in 2024.
Her talent to collision weighty photographs makes her a worthy lower-middle-order batter in a workforce that struggles to attain fast runs, particularly going right into a T20 Global Cup.
Pakistan schoolteacher Muhammad Wasim believes Sana’s talent to govern from the entrance with bat and ball is a standout quality.
“Fatima Sana ticks all the boxes as a captain,” Wasim advised Al Jazeera. “She understands the game very well and commands respect from the group.”
Then again, important her workforce in a global match the place they’ve traditionally didn’t produce an impact poses a unique problem for Sana.
Pakistan have by no means improved presen the crowd level of a T20 Global Cup. And with Team A combatants akin to Australia, Bharat, Unutilized Zealand and Sri Lanka, the ladies in inexperienced may aim to shake off the unenviable file another time.
In 2024, Pakistan have received best 4 of the 15 T20 suits, however the captain believes in her workforce’s talent to spring a miracle on the Global Cup.
Her easy mantra is: “Play attacking cricket, handle the pressure better, and stay calm when the matches get tight.”
Sana recognises that Pakistan’s energy lies of their flexible bowling assault, however desires the batters to step up and put up larger rankings to walk in international competitions.
“I want teams to be wary of facing us,” she mentioned.
Her best logo of captaincy could be a concoction of her coach Sana Mir’s honesty, England captain Heather Knight’s communique abilities and previous Bharat males’s captain MS Dhoni’s quitness.
Important a Pakistani cricket workforce – males’s or girls’s – is without doubt one of the hardest jobs within the recreation and one that includes relentless scrutiny.
It’s also some of the perfect jobs to lose, particularly nearest a Global Cup. Sana, regardless that, left-overs undeterred and desires to “live in the present”.
“I want to give my best and enjoy this responsibility.”
The 🇵🇰 gamers are setting up the difficult yards forward of the Girls’s #T20WorldCup 💪#WhateverItTakes pic.twitter.com/Nw2KNcPKNR
— T20 Global Cup (@T20WorldCup) September 28, 2024