Shahid Mahmood, first Pakistani player to take ten wickets in an innings, dies aged 81

Shahid Mahmood, the first Pakistan player to have taken all ten wickets in a first-class innings, has died in New Jersey on Sunday. Mahmood was 81, and had achieved the feat of taking all ten wickets in 1969 during a career that spanned from 1956 to 1970. He toured England with Pakistan in 1962, playing one Test as an opener, which remained his only international game.

A left-hand opening batsman and medium-pace bowler, Mahmood was born in Lucknow in India in 1939, but moved to Pakistan after partition in 1947. He played most of his domestic cricket from the Karachi region. He earned a national call-up after averaging 44.21 in the domestic 1961-62 season, scoring 619 runs. On the tour of England, he played a total of 13 games, with 12 first-class fixtures in addition to his sole Test. He scored 369 runs across those games from 25 innings at an average of 16.04.

He went on to play domestic cricket till 1970, making 3,117 runs in first-class cricket at an average of 31.80 with five hundreds and 15 fifties.

His ten-wicket haul in an innings came for Karachi Whites against Khairpur at the National Stadium, where he led his team to an innings-and-56-run win. He took 10 for 58 in 25 overs as Khairpur were bowled out for 146. No other bowler in the Karachi Whites side bowled more than nine overs. His feat remained unparalleled for 20 years until Imran Adil, a medium-pacer from Bahawalpur, took 10 for 92 against Faisalabad in 1989. Later on, Naeem Akhtar took 10 for 28 for Rawalpindi Blues against Peshawar in 1995, and then Zulfiqar Babar took 10 for 143 for Multan against Islamabad in 2009.

Mahmood made 163 runs at 54.33 in his final season in 1969-70, and then moved out of Pakistan to settle in USA.