We all know ODIs are a dying breed. There are fewer and fewer of them being played every single year, and unless its a world cup year we'd be massively lucky to see 10 in a year. Gone are the days where players could rack up 250, 300 ODIs in their career. Because of this, the comparison between players of the 90s/2000s and today is also super skewed and to put it bluntly, todays guys don't get nearly as much credit as they deserve IMO. They're constantly compared to players who have 200,300 games while barely having 100 themselves. It makes no sense to compare centuries, runs, wickets, etc unless the # of games is comparable.
But what would it look like if they got an equal amount of chances?
TLDR: they're all really, REALLY good. Like, either on track to or already have shattered every Pakistan ODI record level good
Methodology
The most ODIs played by Pakistan over a 10 year span is 312, from 1996 up to and including 2005. Pakistan played 312 ODIs in this time meaning on average 31.2 per year. I will use this as a baseline rate, multiplied by the % of games the player was available, divide this by games played and you'll get a "scale factor"
Example
Babar Azam debuted in May 2015 which was 11.5 years ago, has played 145 games out of 162 by Pakistan in that time, meaning ~90% of games. 31.2 games/year x 11.5 years x 90% of possible games played = 323 games. 323 divided by 145 is 2.23, so TLDR Babar would have (theoretically) played 2.23x as many ODIs if he played in the '96-'05 era. We can just "predict" his career stats by multiplying everything by 2.23
So after all that yapping, here is what the scale factors would be for the 5 most capped current Pakistan ODI players:
| Player |
Years Played |
Actual Games Played |
% of games available played |
Theoretical games played |
Scale Factor |
| Babar Azam |
11.5 |
145 |
90 |
323 |
2.23 |
| Fakhar Zaman |
9.5 |
94 |
73 |
216 |
2.29 |
| Shaheen Afridi |
8 |
79 |
73 |
182 |
2.30 |
| Mohammad Rizwan |
11.5 |
103 |
64 |
230 |
2.23 |
| Imam Ul Haq |
9 |
75 |
61 |
150 |
2 |
So we just need to take the main counting stats (runs, wickets, 50s, centuries, etc) and multiply it by the given scale factor. Averages, strike rates and economies don't change since those are rates and not raw numbers.
Final Tallies in order of games played
Babar: 323 games, 14,952 runs, 45 hundreds, 85 50s ( 3k runs clear of Inzi for most runs in 50 fewer games)
Rizwan: 230 games, 6643 runs, 9 hundreds, 42 50s
Fakhar: 216 games, 8878 runs, 25 hundreds, 44 50s (4th most runs 2nd most 100s in 60-70 fewer games than anyone near him)
Shaheen: 182 games, 342 wickets, 18 4fors, 7 5fors ( #4 in wickets, #3 in 5fors before age 27)
Imam: 150 games, 6304 runs, 18 hundreds, 40 50s (#4 in hundreds, more centuries in about half the games as M. Yousuf for reference)
These guys aren't just good, they took the record books and nuked it. Keep in mind this wouldn't even be their final career stats, this is their projected stats at their current age, meaning that they still have 3, 4, maybe even up to 10 years to (theoretically) add to these stats.
"But pitches are flatter nowadays" yes they are, ODI cricket is about 15-20% higher scoring now than it used to be. These guys aren't 15-20% above the pack, they're almost lapping them. And it means Shaheen is producing at an especially elite level considering he's playing in a harder era to bowl in.
"But stats in bilaterals don't mean shit" How do you think teams managed 32 ODIs a year for an entire decade which allowed players to rack up these counting stats to begin with? It wasn't by playing tournaments, lemme tell you that much.
The lack of ODIs in this era really have deprived us of an entire generation of players that had the chance to completely rewrite the Pakistan record books.
