67 Innings. 2 Years of Criticism. One Night in Karachi That Changed Everything — Babar Azam Is Back.

 

There is a certain kind of silence that only the truly confident can maintain. Not the silence of someone who has nothing to say — but the silence of someone who has decided that the bat will do the talking when the moment comes.

For two years, Babar Azam kept that silence. Critics filled it for him. Analysts filled it. Press conferences became ambushes. Every innings that did not produce fireworks in the first six overs became another headline about strike rates and outdated techniques and whether Pakistan's greatest modern batter had simply run out of road in T20 cricket.

Then on April 19, 2026, at the National Stadium in Karachi, against Quetta Gladiators, Babar Azam picked up his bat and ended the argument. Not with words. Not with a press conference. With 100 runs off 52 balls — a strike rate of 192 — and a leap of pure, unfiltered joy that said everything he had refused to say for two years.

The silence is over. Babar is back.

How Bad Did It Actually Get?

To understand what Sunday night meant, you have to understand how dark the road to it was. And it was genuinely dark — not in the way that fans sometimes exaggerate a bad patch, but in a real, documented, painful way.

The 2026 ICC Men's T20 World Cup was supposed to be Babar's stage. Pakistan went in with hopes, with plans, with a batting lineup built around their best player. Babar averaged 22.75 across four innings at a strike rate of 112.35. In a format that demands 150 minimums from your top order, those numbers were impossible to defend. The moment that stung the most came when Pakistan needed a win against Sri Lanka in a must-win match. The selectors made a call that no one wanted to make — Babar Azam, Pakistan's all-time leading T20 run-scorer, was dropped.

Let that land for a second. Dropped. From a must-win game. The man who has more T20 runs than any other Pakistani in history, sitting in the stands while his country played without him.

The criticism had been building for two years before that. His strike rate in T20 cricket had become a national obsession — talked about on every cricket show, debated in every dressing room, dissected in every press conference he walked into. When a reporter once compared him unfavourably to Virat Kohli, Babar lost his composure briefly — a rare sight from a man who usually presents an immovable public front. "Can't smash," he said, when asked about hitting sixes. "That is not my strength." It was an honest answer. It was used against him for months.

By the time PSL 2026 started, the question being asked about Babar Azam was no longer "how good is he?" It was something far more brutal: "Is he finished in T20 cricket?"

PSL 2026 — The Quiet Rebuild

What Babar did at the start of PSL 2026 was not dramatic. There were no sudden explosions, no overnight transformation. He scored 43. Then 87 not out. Then 71. Runs that got Peshawar Zalmi over the line, runs that were crucial, runs that showed the instincts were still there — but runs that, to his critics, still did not prove the point they wanted proven.

His strike rate through the early part of the tournament sat around 130 to 132. Not bad by normal standards. Completely unacceptable by the impossible standard now applied specifically to Babar Azam. Through all of this, Zalmi kept winning — and Babar kept captaining, kept leading, kept showing up in the big moments. But the noise around his strike rate refused to die.

Even his own coach Azhar Mahmood was forced to step into the debate. After the century, Mahmood pointed out that Babar was being asked to play a role in T20 cricket that simply did not suit his natural game — batting at number four in the World Cup instead of opening, where he had always been most destructive. "The problem for Babar Azam was what was demanded from him," Mahmood said. "Even Sahibzada Farhan's T20I strike rate is not too different from Babar's. We should admit Pakistan does not have 190-200 strike rate players."

The coach was defending his captain. Nobody was really listening.

April 19 — The Night Everything Changed

Quetta Gladiators came to bowl first. Babar walked out to open, as he always does for Zalmi, with the kind of quiet focus that those who have watched him for years recognise immediately. This was not the Babar who was trying to prove something. This was the Babar who had decided something.

The third ball he faced — 145kph, shaping away — he carved through backward point for four. One shot. That was all anyone needed to see. A man in pristine touch does not think about where the ball is going. He simply plays it. Babar played it.

What followed over the next 49 deliveries was as complete a batting performance as PSL 2026 had produced. He was not reckless. He did not suddenly become a different cricketer. He was Babar Azam — precise, classical, elegant — except on this night he had added something to the package. He picked his moments. He accelerated exactly when Quetta had no answer. He finished with six fours and four sixes — and his hundred came off 52 balls, the fastest century of his entire PSL career.

Peshawar Zalmi posted 255 for 3. Quetta Gladiators were bowled out for 137. Zalmi won by 118 runs — one of the most dominant performances of the entire tournament. And in the middle of it all was Babar, leap in the air, fists clenched, letting out something that two years of holding it together had kept locked inside.

The Records That Came With It

This is where the numbers become genuinely staggering. When Babar Azam scored that century, it was not just his 3rd PSL hundred — it made him the player with the most centuries in PSL history. It was also his 12th T20 century overall. And somewhere in the middle of that innings, he quietly became the fastest batter in history to reach 12,000 T20 runs — breaking records previously held by Virat Kohli and Chris Gayle, two men who between them have rewritten cricket's record books in this format for twenty years.

His PSL 2026 stats now read: 401 runs, average of 100.25, strike rate of 143.73. The same critics who spent two years questioning his T20 credentials now have to look at those numbers and ask themselves what exactly they were complaining about.

It had been 67 innings since his last T20 century. Sixty-seven innings of deliveries, of dot balls written about in articles, of press conference questions designed to make him crack. He did not crack. He waited. And then he scored 100 off 52 balls against Quetta and collected his records with the same composure he always brings to everything.

What This Means For Zalmi — And For Pakistan

Peshawar Zalmi are unbeaten in PSL 2026. Eight matches played, eight results that have gone their way. We have been tracking this remarkable run all season — from the Kusal Mendis masterclasses to Sufiyan Muqeem's death bowling heroics — and the common thread through all of it has been Babar at the top of the order, providing the platform, making the runs, refusing to lose.

With 401 runs in the tournament, Babar and Mendis have together amassed more than any other opening partnership in PSL 2026. The next best contributor in the Zalmi lineup is almost 150 runs behind. This is not a team that wins despite Babar. This is a team that wins because of him.

For Pakistan cricket more broadly, the timing could not be more important. Just as Vaibhav Suryavanshi is writing the opening chapter of what promises to be a long Indian cricket story, Babar Azam's PSL 2026 campaign is reminding Pakistan — and the world — that the best chapter of his own story may not have been written yet. He is 31. He has 12 T20 centuries. He has 12,000 T20 runs. And on the evidence of this PSL, his best cricket still lies ahead of him.

One More Thing Worth Saying

Cricket is a sport that is often cruel to its best players. The scrutiny is unrelenting, the expectations impossible, and the gap between being celebrated and being written off can be a single bad tournament. Babar Azam has lived through that cycle in the last two years — celebrated, doubted, dropped, questioned, and written off by people who should have known better.

He never stopped turning up. He never stopped scoring runs. And when the moment came — one night in Karachi, against Quetta, with everything riding on what this innings meant — he scored a hundred off 52 balls and broke records belonging to two of the greatest T20 batters the game has ever seen.

The silence was never weakness. It was patience. And on April 19, 2026, the patience paid off in full.

Stay with The Yorker Crew for complete PSL 2026 and IPL 2026 coverage every day. Check out our Zalmi vs Sultans match preview, our April 13 cricket roundup, and our MS Dhoni return story for more from the most exciting cricket season in years. 🏏