Pakistan cricket's hidden hero: How Abid Ali Kazi preserved a nation's sporting soul

 JournalismPakistan.com |  Published last month |  Dr. Nauman Niaz (TI)

ISLAMABAD — It was Gul Hameed Bhatti who first asked me to connect with Abid Ali Kazi. Fate, however, is never so plain. I had gone to PakTel's office in Islamabad, hunting sponsorship for a tour brochure while heading media at the Pakistan Cricket Board.

There, behind the door, I encountered him, not in grandeur, but in ordinariness: the heavy moustache of Sindh, eyes carrying a drunken glaze, the puffiness of sleepless nights. He looked like a man who had wandered from the side-alleys of time. Yet I knew of him, revelations of his devotion to lost scorecards, his evenings bent over Academy of Cricket Statisticians journals, his labour with Gul Hameed Bhatti and Nauman Badr, exhuming cricket's forgotten fragments and darning them into the Wills Cricket Annuals.

From Media Partnership to Lifelong Friendship

I was already writing professionally for The News International, contributing lavishly to the tour brochure. He smiled when I walked in, offered me a cigarette, and promised to consider the sponsorship. But promises gave way to conversation, about cricket, about history, about the slow decay of first-class standards. Hours passed unnoticed, the office emptied, and when he rose to leave, it was as though we had crossed a threshold. A first meeting had grown into a flow of regular dialogue, and in time, into friendship.

Abid was the son of a Federal Secretary, but he was more than lineage. He was a literature addict, his home a reservoir of books. He quit the safety of bureaucracy in Islamabad and returned to Karachi, consulting by day, chasing cricket's ghosts by night. Our lives began to run in tandem. He led me into memorabilia collecting, pointing me towards flea markets, forgotten shops, and the corners of Karachi where dust-covered books still held their secrets.

The Birth of 'The Blazing Strokes'

One day, we decided to put together a show, The Blazing Strokes, for Aaj TV. We argued over its order, sparring in ideas, trumpeting over each other, yet it was this discord that brought colour to the programme. My video archives, his memory, and our combined fire ensured its resonance. The show drew such notice that other channels mimicked the idea with different faces, though the soul was already ours.

He was honest, refined, and educated, as were his siblings. He carried his blue-blooded Sindhi manners with a natural poise. Somewhere in that journey, he became my mentor, and I, unwillingly perhaps, his family's doctor. He sought to tame me, to dull my provocations, and in his patient way, he did.

A Passion Beyond Recognition

Casual in demeanour, yet fierce in passion, he devoted himself to preserving Pakistan's first-class records, producing a set of five books, works that slipped like trinkets into Pakistan's cricket literature. He never craved recognition; he did it because cricket demanded remembrance. Like Bhatti, he grasped cricket's evolution, its transitions, and hypocrisies. He spoke of W.G. Grace, of Trumper, of Aboriginal dilemmas, of Maori struggles, of West Indian oppression and apartheid in South Africa, of how cricket had been held hostage by the corporate. His vision was panoramic, his concerns timeless.

He adored my book collection, often urging me to write. I still believe, had he not departed for Canada in search of a safer future for his children, we would have built books together, a handful of television projects, especially when I helmed PTV Sports from 2012 until 2022.

Through Triumph and Tribulation

We mourned together, too. When Nauman Badr died, our third stooge, it was not 'premature' to us, for we believed in the mystery of death and life's predestined arc. And then, came his heart attack, the sudden collapse of the body he had overworked. As he underwent cardiac revascularisation, I told him: 'Kazi sahib, don't leave me alone.' He laughed through his pain: 'I am not dying until you compile the official history of Pakistan cricket.'

When my own trial arrived, Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, he rang me in the quiet of the morning. In his satirical way, he barked life back into me: 'You have loads to do, so you ain't dying. Evil never dies young.' Then he chuckled: 'You need to reorganize your memorabilia; we have to jointly produce loads of literature before we hit the grave.'

The Making of a Cricket Legend

This was Abid. Not for limelight, not for applause. An analyst, a statistician, a custodian of memory, shy of media glitter, yet luminous in the quietest way. If legends are those who preserve and give without demanding return, then to me Abid Ali Kazi remains just that, an absolute legend.

In Karachi, on the 20th of July 1961, was born a child who would grow to carry within his mind the memory of a nation's cricket, a curator of time, a restorer of the scorecard's faded print. Abid Ali Kazi did not strike his presence upon the cricketing world by the clang of a top player, nor by the roar of a stadium crowd hailing his feats upon the field.

The Quiet Revolution of Cricket Archives

It was not the glory of the playing arena, but the quietude of the archivist's place, the patient sifting of forgotten newspapers, the long hours where silence is the companion and memory the sole instrument of craft. If in cricket there are men who fashion centuries with their will, there are also those who preserve them with their untainted passion and Kazi belongs to the latter tribe, indispensable yet unheralded, luminous in darkness.

From the mid-1970s, as other boys of Karachi dreamt of becoming Miandads and Zaheers, Kazi realised, with a candour unusual in youth, that his destiny lay not in the parade of boundaries and wickets but in the unseen basilica of history. He perceived that his cricketing nous would not take him to the centre stage of Tests and tournaments. But where the playing abilities could not transport him, the word, the figure, and the record would.

The Five-Volume Masterpiece

And so he gave himself to writing, to the beauty of statistics, to the almost monastic discipline of analysis. What others dismissed as mere numbers, he lifted into narrative; what seemed trivial scorelines, he rendered into parables of a nation's sporting soul.

His greatest work, his enduring testament, is the recovery and binding of Pakistan's domestic history. Between 1947 and 1975, much of the cricket that was played within Pakistan's borders lingered in obscurity. Matches came and went, crowds gathered and dispersed, but the records were scattered to the winds. Newspapers frayed, archives crumbled, and a nation that had come late to the international stage seemed condemned to lose the very landscape of its beginnings.

Resurrection of Lost Cricket History

It was into this vacuum that Kazi stepped, not as a crusader sounding trumpets, but as a craftsman with patient hands. He sought out forgotten scorecards, corrected them, restored them, and gave them permanence.

Out of this labour was born First-Class Cricket in Pakistan, five volumes monumental in their seriousness and detail, covering the span from the partition years of 1947–48 until the season of 1974–75. These books, like carefully cut gemstones, placed Pakistan's cricketing inheritance within a frame at last. They are not just compilations; they are resurrections. In them lies the toil of men who played without applause, of teams who competed in Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Quetta, under skies often clouded with uncertainty. Without Kazi's vigilance, their feats might have passed into irretrievable night.
International Recognition and Local Neglect

Recognition, of course, arrived, though belated and modest compared with the magnitude of the task. In 2004, the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians declared him their Statistician of the Year. But such titles are mere adornments. The true worth of his work is in the way it has given Pakistan the foundation of memory. For a nation without a past is a nation forever condemned to amnesia, and in cricket, where memory is lyricism, such amnesia is an impoverishment.

Kazi did not labour alone. In 1983, alongside the inimitable Gul Hameed Bhatti, he co-founded the Pakistan Association of Cricket Statisticians and Scorers. Together they dug into the bones of matches, preserving not only what was glamorous, but also what was necessary. Their partnership became a lamp for those who sought clarity in the fog of half-recorded games.

Pakistan's Voice in Wisden

Since 1987, Kazi has carried this duty to the wider world as Pakistan's correspondent for Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, cricket's book of eternity. To open those august pages and find Pakistan's voice threaded there through Kazi's pen is to recognise how a lone statistician can give a country its permanence in the global tale.

In their patient research, they did more than gather forgotten numbers; they altered the very history of Pakistan's first-class cricket. With the diligence of archaeologists brushing away the dust of centuries, they unearthed another match, long hidden, long unsung, and proclaimed it the true beginning. Thus, the match venerated for half a century as the inaugural first-class game was gently dethroned, and in its place rose this rediscovered encounter, shimmering with the aura of revelation. In that moment, history itself was rewritten, and cricket, ever capricious in its memory, found a new genesis in the land.

Media Presence and Editorial Excellence

There was, too, his public side, though it never overran the modesty of his manner. In 2007, on Aaj TV, he co-hosted The Blazing Strokes, a weekly cricket show that gave the wider audience a taste of his insight. But unlike others who flourish under the camera's brightness, Kazi seemed almost shy of its glare, preferring the reticence of the scholar to the ostentation of celebrity. His words were chosen not for performance but for truth.

Yet his literary and editorial life was not confined to Pakistan alone. Between March 1990 and February 1995, he served as Managing Editor and Publisher of The Cricketer International, Asian Edition. He wrote widely, with fluency that crossed borders, contributing to national and international publications alike. His books, of which several have appeared, form an unbroken dialogue with the past, each page pulling some forgotten fact, some lost figure, into the present.

Administrative Excellence at PCB

Even his professional career within cricket's administration bore the stamp of his clarity. In 2001, he took up the post of General Manager of Marketing at the Pakistan Cricket Board. Though such offices are often plagued by bureaucracy and the weight of commerce, Kazi carried into them his commitment to the deeper values of the game: preservation, organisation, and the nourishment of legacy.

Philosophy of Preservation

If there is a thread through all of Kazi's work, it is one of devotion without spectacle. He has never courted applause, never trumpeted his own importance. His contribution has always been in the service of cricket itself. Like the scorer who sits quietly by the boundary, invisible to the crowd, yet without whom no match can truly exist, Kazi embodies the spirit of those who preserve rather than perform. In his quietness there is profundity; in his diligence, immortality.

When one contemplates Kazi's journey, one is struck not only by the catalogue of achievements, statistician of the year, co-founder of associations, correspondent of Wisden, editor, author, administrator but by the underlying philosophy. He has understood cricket as something more than a sport. He has perceived it as a continuum, a narrative of people and places, of cultures and collisions, of history etched upon the thin lines of scorecards. To him, cricket is a civilisation expressed through matches, and civilisation cannot afford to lose its memory.

Guardian of Permanence

In a land where politics often overwhelms sport, where governance is fragile and institutions fleeting, Kazi's labour has been one of endurance. He has been the custodian of permanence amidst impermanence. While others sought the transience of headlines, he sought the immortality of record. His books, his compilations, his broadcasts, his writings, these are his monuments. They do not stand in marble or bronze, but in paper and ink, in statistics that hold within them entire afternoons of cricket in Sialkot, Bahawalpur, Hyderabad, and Multan.

The Testament of Cricket Scripture

Abid Ali Kazi's story is a reminder that cricket, like all art, needs its chroniclers as much as its practitioners. Without the Neville Carduses, the CLR Jameses, the scorers, the archivists, the statisticians, the game dissolves into mere play. It is through such hands that cricket becomes literature, history, and myth. Kazi, in his own way, has given Pakistan its cricketing scripture, its testament of record. He has transformed the ephemeral into the eternal.

And so, when one thinks of him, one does not think of a man hunched over tables of numbers, but of a guardian who has walked through the dusty corridors of time, gathering fragments and piecing them together, until Pakistan's cricket stands not as a blurred memory but as a coherent whole. In the orchestra of the game, he may not be the batsman striking fours or the bowler tearing through defences, but he is the archivist ensuring the music is not lost, that the notes are written down, that future generations may still hear them.

Hidden Gems and Cricket Curiosities

Did you know that Syed Wazir Ali, that elegant Indian batsman of the inter-war years, closed his first-class career not in India but across the border, in Pakistan? That Yawar Saeed and his father, Mian Saeed, provided the one singular instance in Pakistan cricket of father and son opposing each other in the same match? And one of the teams had Mian Saeed's son-in-law, Fazal Mahmood, also participating. It was virtually a family affair. Such curiosities, at once strange and poetic, are the golden dust hidden in the long corridors of cricket's archives.

There is more. Jahangir Khan and Majid Khan, father and son alike, each contrived centuries on their respective first-class debuts and each picked a haul of five or more to go with their individual hundreds, a symmetry of fate that reads like a parable. Four Pakistan cricketers, Yawar Saeed, Faqir Aizazuddin, Khurshid Ahmed, and Asif Iqbal, first stepped into the realm of first-class cricket not on home soil but abroad, as though Pakistan's cricketing consciousness were already destined to roam beyond its borders.

The Most Melancholy Cricket Record

The archives even hold what must be the most melancholy annotation in the long annals of the game. Nowhere else in cricket has a player's name been inscribed with such devastating finality: Absent Dead. Abdul Aziz, who fell to his fate between innings, remains pencilled thus into the history of Pakistan's cricket.

It is such discoveries that remind us how scorecards are not lifeless ledgers, but histories of humanity itself, curious, tragic, and glorious by turns. They are not, as often mocked, the private indulgence of tweed-coated eccentrics haunting attics and dusty offices. In the hands of Abid Ali Kazi, these relics breathe with resonance.

Twenty Years of Monastic Devotion

His publications are not just reproductions of scores; they are illuminated manuscripts of cricket's forgotten narrative, charged with context and background, with the fragrance of the age in which the games were played.

Within little more than six years, scarcely the length of a Twenty20 match in the grand measure of time, Kazi has published five volumes chronicling Pakistan's first-class history, covering 1947–48 to 1974–75. But their genesis lies not in six years' industry alone. Just as a tree falls with the hundred-and-first stroke of the axe because of the hundred that went before, so do these volumes rest upon two decades of relentless, almost monastic devotion.

The Seeds of Passion

Kazi's passion was seeded in youth, when he pursued an engineering degree in Karachi. Nights found him hunched over anonymous score sheets, often till the small hours, recording figures whose meaning to the wider world seemed negligible. 'I sensed a life behind each name,' he would later recall. 'Every match carried me back in time. This was history being created in Pakistan, and I felt I had to record it.' In that quiet labour, he discovered what many had overlooked: that first-class cricket was not simply a prologue to Test arenas, but the bloodstream of the national game.

Building the Cathedral of Remembrance

He soon realised that Pakistan's domestic record was not being properly published at all. Matches appeared in fragments, in annuals and in scattered journals, often incomplete, often erroneous. Gul Hameed Bhatti's The Cricketer magazine had made gallant efforts; Ghulam Mustafa Khan, under the BCCP, had issued occasional annuals. Yet large gaps remained. To Kazi's eye, this neglect was a scandal. If England and Australia could trace their cricketing past back a century through printed scorecards, why not Pakistan? Why should her history be condemned to tatters and contradictions?

With like-minded allies, Bhatti himself, Masood Hamid, and Nauman Badar, he set about building the Pakistan Association of Cricket Statisticians and Scorers. His first substantial foray came in 1982, when, with Masood Hamid, he produced The Pakistan Book of Test Cricket, a full record of the country's Tests, complete with scorecards, summaries, and feats. This was the first solid brick in what became a cathedral of remembrance.

The Archaeological Quest for Cricket History

But the true flame burned within him for domestic cricket. After completing his postgraduate degree abroad and witnessing the scrupulous preservation of cricket history in England, he returned in 1988 with a sharper resolve. The challenge was immense. Records were scattered across newspapers, libraries, and private scrapbooks, as broken and disordered as soldiers after battle. 'There was simply no identifiable system,' he would recount. 'Where scores survived, they were often contradictory, the names misspelt, the details incomplete.'

The work was miserable, thankless, and labyrinthine. Yet he persisted, piecing together fragments until they formed coherent wholes. Each match restored was an act of resurrection. What seemed at first like dry numbers became windows into afternoons long vanished, where Abdul Hafeez Kardar marshalled his men, where Hanif Mohammad batted as though for eternity, where crowds leaned against the wooden railings of provincial grounds.

From Skeleton to Living History

In the hands of others, a scorecard is a skeleton. In the hands of Kazi, it is a body with flesh, with breath, with a heartbeat. His books are not tables of runs and wickets, but literature, statistical perhaps, but steeped in the same lyricism that Cardus once drew from the sound of bat on ball. What emerges from Kazi's labour is more than history. It is a philosophy: that cricket, even in its most forgotten forms, is part of a nation's cultural and emotional fabric. That to neglect first-class cricket is to neglect the soil from which Tests and triumphs grow. Through his work, Pakistan now possesses the archive of its domestic soul, the testimony of its striving years.

The Frontier's Last Stand

And so, when one holds the five volumes of First-Class Cricket in Pakistan, one holds more than books. One holds the persistence of memory against time's erosion; one holds the quiet triumph of an archivist who gave his life to ensure that Pakistan's cricket would not vanish into oblivion. They stand as literature disguised as a ledger, as poetry clothed in numbers. He seemed embarked on a pursuit so solitary, so eccentric, that it looked, to the casual eye, like a dead-end track. Yet within him stirred a resolve not unlike the line from an American frontier tale: 'I want to see the frontier one last time, sir, before it is gone forever.'

The Archaeologist of Cricket

The task seized him not as a pastime but as destiny seizes a man by the collar. No neat archives were waiting to be unlocked, no grand volumes resting in polished libraries. Instead, there were fragments, scraps of newspapers, half-legible scorecards, and fading memories of men long retired. Like an archaeologist of the game, he fitted these fragments together. His spectacles became his pickaxe, his notebook the shovel, as he journeyed through the dim lanes of Karachi's suburbs or the forgotten recesses of Lahore, tracking down a former scorer, an old player, even an umpire who could say whether a batsman had scored fifteen or sixteen runs on some long-forgotten afternoon in Dera Ghazi Khan.

Vision Beyond Pedantry

What drove him was not pedantry but vision. The Holy Grail, for Kazi, might be as modest as a corrected date of birth, a clarified dismissal, or the discovery of when a stadium had first hosted cricket. Each fact was a fragment of eternity, and he would not let it vanish. Soon, he realised that to map Pakistan's cricket properly, he must travel further back than 1947. Jahangir Khan, Amir Elahi, and others had given their finest years to cricket before partition, yet ended their careers under Pakistan's flag. To tell their stories, he had to delve into the cricket of the 1920s and '30s. For him, it was simple: first-class is first-class, irrespective of where it is played.

The Art of Correspondence

And so correspondence began to flow. Letters sped across to India, to England, to Australia, requesting details of Ranji Trophy matches, borrowing from the collective memory of the game's guardians. This was long before email, before the click of instant communication. Even fax machines were luxuries. The post, with all its delays, became the artery of his mission. One might assume the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack would have provided him with the nourishment he sought. But Wisden offered only abbreviations, skeletal outlines of matches, not the flesh-and-blood details he craved. What Kazi desired was the full human record: the biographical sketch, the spelling corrected, the player identified as right- or left-handed, the confirmation of whether he was batsman, bowler, or all-rounder. Without such detail, a scorecard was for him unfinished music.

The Battle Against Errors

Errors were legion. A single player might appear twice in history under two different names, thanks to the vagaries of scorers who spelled carelessly. Names such as Salim Malik might appear with an 'I' here and an 'ee' there; Kazi's stern duty was to standardise them, to grant posterity a single, authentic record. 'The statistician will record it in posterity with 'ee',' he would say, with wry precision.

He sought out long-forgotten cricketers, many of whom had lived their lives in silence after a single match. For Kazi, their stories mattered as much as those of the greats. Each life, each run, each wicket was part of the tapestry. He would track down former players, umpires, even anonymous scorers, asking questions that seemed absurdly precise to the uninitiated: did this man bat right-handed? Was he born in December or January? Did he live long enough to see independence? In these details lies the wholeness of history.

Testimonies from the Past

There were moments of revelation, too. He recalled one man, Ehsan Salik, whose memory shone with such clarity that he could recall the names of umpires in particular matches decades gone by. These testimonies, cross-referenced and corroborated, became lifelines to a past in danger of perishing. 'They would have taken with them information which just would not be available anywhere today,' Kazi reflected. 'In compiling statistical history, you cannot ignore even that cricketer who played just one match. A discrepancy of one run means the scorecard cannot be printed until it is corrected.'

Pilgrimage in Pursuit of Records

The pursuit demanded not merely patience but pilgrimage. He and his colleagues ventured into unlikely places: cricket board offices, forgotten libraries, even the godowns of the Income Tax department, which once fielded a cricket team. There, amidst dust and disarray, they searched for ledgers that might yield a missing match. It was the romance of adventure and the rigour of scholarship entwined.

And yet, for all the seeming eccentricity, what Kazi accomplished was nothing less than the reconstitution of a nation's cricketing memory. He brought order where there was chaos, permanence where there was ephemera. What began as a solitary pursuit, easily mistaken for folly, has become the granite foundation upon which Pakistan's cricketing history now stands.

The Final Excavation

When Abid Ali Kazi first bent his head to the task, 150 first-class matches were missing from Pakistan's recorded past, ghost matches, faintly revealed in dusty corners, but untraceable. Years of toil followed, and by 1998, the shadow had lifted until only 23 remained elusive. At last, with the aid of Ghulam Mustafa Khan, those final relics were unearthed from the recesses of the Board's offices, like manuscripts rescued from the embers. In that moment, Pakistan's statistical history, once perilously incomplete, was secured for eternity.

Tales from the Graveyard

There is a tale he tells with laughter, though it reveals the strange seriousness of his mission: one assistant, deputed to discover the date of birth of a cricketer long dead, found even the family in ignorance. Undeterred, he walked to the graveyard and, stooping by the tombstone, copied what the stone itself had guarded. Thus, the silence of the grave was made to serve the living record of cricket.
The Workshops and the Mission

Through the years, with his contemporaries at the Pakistan Association of Cricket Statisticians and Scorers, he conducted workshops across cities, instructing scorers, harmonising methods, and ridding the game of errors in its chronicles. For what are numbers if they are riddled with contradiction? To Kazi, a scorecard without fidelity was a desecration. In his five volumes lies the harvest of this fidelity: corrected scores, faithfully tallied averages, confirmed identities of players, the dates and places of birth, and, where known, of death.

The Cost of Devotion

That such an edifice has been raised by one whose profession lay far from cricket makes it the more remarkable. Kazi's daily bread came from marketing computers, then from steering the fortunes of a cellular company, and later from sports marketing. Yet never was he stumped for time when the call of cricket's memory beckoned. By day, he worked in commerce; by night, he kept his vigil over lost matches.

It came at a cost. At forty-three, he bore the weariness of one whose personal life had often yielded to labour. Family holidays were abandoned; birthdays perhaps went unnoticed. His books, begun in 1994, consumed him wholly. He might not recall the exact date of his son's first day at school, yet he could tell you with unerring certainty who batted for Punjab against Combined Universities at Bahawalpur in the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy of 1957.

Pure Labour of Love

His volumes bear no advertisements, no sponsors' obtrusive messages. He paid for their printing himself, knowing full well that no commercial hand would subsidise so rare a pursuit. They were labours of love, ascetic in production, pure in intent. Strangely, the books found more buyers in England and Australia than in Pakistan itself, a paradox almost cruel: a nation indifferent to its own memory, while strangers abroad purchased its chronicles. At home, he gifted them freely to those few who truly cared. 'People who love the game know what I have done and they appreciate the effort,' he once remarked, in a tone of quiet, Majid Khan-like understatement.

The Future of Pakistan Cricket Records

Plans are already laid for further editions, to carry the story of Pakistan's first-class game up to 1979–80, after which records were finally maintained with official diligence. The hardest miles of the journey are behind him, but he has trodden them almost alone. It is an irony, bitter yet familiar in our land, that such a man is feted more abroad than at home. For years he has been the Pakistan correspondent of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, the game's bible, and he is a member of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians in England. There, his authority is revered. Here, too often, it is overlooked.

The Humble Philosophy

And yet he has never clamoured for fame. He has been content to collect his seashells upon the beach of time, stooping day by day to gather what the tide might wash away. His work, like the sound of a distant innings recalled in dream, was done because it had to be done. He was, in a sense, chosen by cricket itself, entrusted with its memory. Asked why he persevered in the face of neglect and indifference, he once answered with the simplicity of a man who knows his calling: 'I just want to leave something behind. Just as I was helped by books written fifty years ago, I hope my work will help future generations. Even if it helps one man, my effort will not have gone to waste.'

The Highest Cricket Honour

At Trent Bridge, in the Long Room of memory and echoes, the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians bestowed in 2004 its highest honour upon a son of Karachi. Abid Ali Kazi was named Statistician of the Year, the accolade conferred upon those whose labours have not merely counted the game's figures but preserved its very soul. The award, announced by Eric Midwinter, President of the Association, placed Kazi in the company of Bill Frindall, Philip Bailey, Gordon Ross, Richard Lockwood, Victor Isaacs, and Brian Croudy, a small brotherhood of men who, through numbers, kept cricket alive. Only seventeen had received it before, and never had an Asian, save one, been called into this fraternity. Now Pakistan, through Kazi, stood alongside them.

Global Recognition

Midwinter spoke with clarity: 'This award is being given to Abid Ali Kazi in recognition of his great services in the compilation of Pakistan Cricket's records and history. The committee and the members of the ACS join with me in congratulating him on this achievement.' It was not simply the honouring of a man, but of a nation's memory rescued from amnesia.

Kazi's work, stretching back twenty years, had already produced five monumental volumes under the title First-Class Cricket in Pakistan. This recognition was no ordinary thing, for Kazi's profession had always stood at odds with his passion. He co-founded the Asian edition of The Cricketer International, became Pakistan's correspondent for Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, and assisted websites across the globe that sought illumination on Pakistan's records. Wherever a statistician faltered, there was always one address: Kazi.

The Seashell Collector

Yet he has never been a man of trumpets and acclaim. His was the life of the collector of seashells, walking the long shore of time, picking one fragment after another, polishing each until it gleamed. He never adorned his volumes with advertisements, never invited sponsors, never angled for fortune. Instead, he printed at his own cost, gifting copies to those who would treasure them, sending others abroad to England and Australia where, paradoxically, more hearts seemed eager for Pakistan's forgotten cricket than in Pakistan itself.
The Irony of Recognition

Recognition abroad, neglect at home: this too has been the irony of his journey. Yet in his low voice and unhurried way he has continued, undistracted. To those who care for cricket as a living memory, he is regarded the final authority on Pakistan's statistical heritage. To them, his name carries the cadence of permanence. Through Abid Ali Kazi, the scattered afternoons of Lahore, Karachi, Bahawalpur, Rawalpindi, Quetta and Multan were gathered, bound, and made immortal. His honour was not only his own; it was cricket's, it was Pakistan's, and it was history's.

The Eternal Legacy of Pakistan's Cricket Memory Keeper

In the final reckoning, Abid Ali Kazi stands as more than a statistician, more than an archivist, more than a compiler of scores. He is the guardian angel of Pakistan cricket's soul, the man who refused to let a nation's sporting heritage vanish into the mists of time. His five volumes are not merely books but monuments to the power of individual dedication, testaments to what one person can achieve when driven by pure passion rather than personal glory.

When future generations seek to understand the roots of Pakistan cricket, when scholars research the forgotten heroes who played on dusty grounds in Sialkot and Multan, when cricket lovers wonder about the matches that built the foundation of the national game, they will turn to the work of Abid Ali Kazi. In preserving the past, he secured cricket's future.

His legacy reminds us that in every field of human endeavour, some perform, those who preserve, those who create moments, and those who ensure those moments are never forgotten. Abid Ali Kazi chose preservation, and in doing so, became unforgettable – the quiet legend who gave Pakistan cricket its memory, its history, and its immortal record.

Dr. Nauman Niaz is a civil award winner (Tamagha-i-Imtiaz) in Sports Broadcasting & Journalism, and is the sports editor at JournalismPakistan.com. He is a regular cricket correspondent, having covered 54 tours and three ICC World Cups, and having written over 3500 articles. He has authored 15 books and is the official historian of Pakistan Cricket (Fluctuating Fortunes IV Volumes - 2005). His signature show, Game On Hai, has been the highest in ratings and acclaim.