Forty-five Pakistani players registered for the Hundred draft for the 2025 season. On Wednesday, exactly none of them were picked for any of the eight teams. That means that this season, the fifth, will be the first to not have any Pakistani players. Given the last two seasons had seen six and four Pakistani players respectively in the league, it is a notable disappearance.
This season, you may have heard, is also going to be the first after the equity sale of Hundred franchises, four of whom are now either part-owned or majority-owned by owners of IPL franchises. Ah, you might think. This is starting to make some sense now. The IPL has long excluded Pakistani players from appearing. Its satellite franchises in leagues in South Africa, the UAE and the USA have also (mostly) excluded Pakistani players.
Relations between the PCB and BCCI (more representative of their governments than ever before) have rarely been worse, or more given to pettiness, as the shenanigans at the recent Champions Trophy prove. It naturally follows that another league with incoming IPL ownership will begin to freeze out Pakistani players. This was exactly the scenario, after all, that the PCB spelt out two-and-a-half years ago. To believe in this sequence of logic is not at all to be a conspiracy theorist.
But - and especially in the context of this Hundred draft - it doesn't help to pretend there aren't other factors, equally compelling if not more so, at play here. For one, the schedule (it's almost always the schedule). Pakistan have two bilateral white-ball commitments in August that clash directly with the Hundred's dates - the first two weeks of August, when they are in the Caribbean for three ODIs and three T20Is, and then a home series with Afghanistan that starts in the third week of that month (and a T20 Asia Cup that starts in September). Given Pakistan are undergoing yet another transition, and there is a T20 World Cup next year, their top players will almost certainly be involved in those series and, so, unavailable for the Hundred.
Also, about those top players: it's not as if Pakistan's white-ball players are exactly hot property at this moment. Three abysmal ICC tournaments in a row have taken all the sheen off a generation of players once expected to abound in, and enrich, these leagues (of course, it could be argued they wouldn't have performed so poorly had they been playing more regularly in those best leagues in the first place). Instead, Pakistan are outdated and stagnant, jarringly out of sync with the game as it is played today.
More than all of this, though, is the wider truth, that the PCB itself is to blame. Successive administrations have flailed between being restrictive and gormless in dealing with player NOCs. The modern landscape demands a flexibility and deftness from boards in player management and the PCB has been as flexible as an iron rod. In fact, in an alternate reading, Pakistan's white-ball regression over the years can be traced directly to how poorly the board has handled NOCs.
A relevant case was revoking Naseem Shah's NOC for the Hundred last year at the last minute, despite there being no clash with any international commitment (and likewise denying three others permission to play in Canada's GT20).
It was done in the name of workload management ahead of a busy season of international cricket, including nine Tests. How did that management turn out? Naseem played in three of those Tests, despite not suffering injury, and none of them consecutively. He wasn't even in Pakistan's last Test squad of the season (Shaheen Afridi, one of those whose NOC was revoked for the GT20, only played two of the nine Tests and wasn't in Pakistan's last two Test squads).
Naseem's is far from the only case. There was Usama Mir. And Azam Khan. And Haris Rauf . And a whole bunch of others.
The PCB will point to the 20 players that did receive NOCs last November, but the stickier conclusion from the last few years is that they have made Pakistani players unattractive options in the marketplace. Why would a franchise take on a Pakistan cricketer when the PCB might abruptly revoke an NOC, or when a training camp call-up cuts a contracted stint unexpectedly short, or when a deal falls through because an unscheduled bilateral series has been shoved into the calendar, or when a player will summarily be called back from a league for a fitness test?
None of this is to deny a looming, creeping reality. With the existing political climate as it is between India and Pakistan, and the continuing spread of IPL franchises around the world, it isn't difficult to see a future in which Pakistani cricketers are marginalised and restricted to a second tier of T20 and T10 leagues (and in that light, who knows what impact going up against the IPL will have on the PSL).
Richard Gould, the ECB's chief executive, insists it won't be the case in the Hundred at least, and it bears repeating that a packed calendar is the likeliest reason for the kiboshing of a high-profile Pakistani presence this year. Nevertheless, it was also Gould who introduced a new NOC policy last November which ends up hitting the PSL hardest in terms of English player availability, while protecting the IPL. Those words might feel cheap to Pakistani ears.
In any case, it's not as if there has ever been a formal bar on Pakistani players from the IPL. Nobody says that bit out loud. It's just been that way forever now. And evidence from the other leagues with IPL ownership is, at the least, suggestive that it is contagious. No Pakistanis in the SA20 in three seasons. Only two Pakistanis in a franchise owned by an IPL owner in the ILT20 in three seasons. Only two Pakistanis in a franchise owned by an IPL owner in MLC in two seasons. Four Pakistanis in franchises owned by an IPL owner in the CPL over many more seasons. Nobody says anything about a bar... and yet.
There are still four Hundred teams not owned by IPL franchises, so there is every chance Pakistani players might be picked up in next season's draft (by which stage the new ownership structures will have kicked in properly). But it would feel like a bucking of a wider trend. And before anything else can happen, it would require the PCB to start helping itself and its players.