Babar Azam has to up his T20 game. And he is in his last chance saloon

This is a small sample of Babar Azam batting during the open nets session at the SSC in Colombo ahead of Pakistan's match against Namibia at the men's T20 World Cup 2026.

Pakistan tearaway Naseem Shah bangs in a short-of-length delivery which Babar swats high over mid-wicket. Left-arm fast bowler Salman Mirza tells Babar his field - deep cover and deep third - before rushing in to deliver another short delivery, wide of off stump. Babar quickly moves closer to the line of the delivery to powerfully unleash an uppercut. With the net enclosed halfway on both the side flanks and behind, it is difficult to gauge how far the ball would have travelled.

When Shadab Khan dips in a legbreak without too many revolutions on the ball, Babar takes two steps forward to loft a drive with a vertical bat towards the straight boundary. Abrar Ahmed's limp legbreak is easily spanked over mid-wicket. It is now about five minutes into the session. Each of the bowlers has already bowled at least two deliveries at Babar, who has been standing a yard outside the crease with a middle-and-off-stump guard.

Naseem unleashes the perfect yorker that is going for the leg stump. Babar clears his left leg away swiftly to dig out the yorker. "I knew the yorker was coming," he says. A little later, Naseem charges in and without any noticeable change in his fast-arm action delivers a leg cutter which Babar, too eager to hit, skies. Naseem doesn't have the heart to tell his senior that it would have been gobbled up on the legside. Babar is furious at himself for getting drawn into committing the mistake. He even uses an expletive berating himself.

This 20-25 minute batting session can be seen through at least two different prisms. One, Babar had a purposeful hit with the motive of showing intent as far as possible. The other, he comes across as trying too hard, too desperate and too keen to flay at every ball without much conviction. Just like the manner in which he tried to hack Axar Patel with the horizontal bat in Khettarama hopelessly. The India match brought to the fore once again the discrepancy between Babar in the nets and Babar in the match. The balls he was whacking in the nets were defensively pushed to deep third in the match.

All this makes one thing clear: Babar is in his last chance saloon.

Some might argue he has been there for several years. Yet, somehow, one of Pakistan's modern-day great batters has managed to keep his spot. Pakistan announced their T20 World Cup squad just before the deadline window was closing and that was due to the deliberation on whether Babar deserves a spot in the 15. Numbers don't support his inclusion. His T20 form clearly doesn't support his inclusion. Among those with at least 500 runs at T20 World Cups, his strike rate of 111.81 is the joint-slowest along with former team-mate Mohammad Hafeez. The names that follow are those of anchors who were significant for batting deep in the early era of T20 batting. And yet Babar is here at his fourth T20 World Cup.

The Pakistan think-tank, too, needs to be more clear in their messaging on Babar. When he was dropped for Asia Cup and then headed to the BBL, Hesson said the message to the senior batter was to up his strike rate. Babar clearly hasn't and yet, he is now playing the T20 World Cup.

If there is something that Babar has, which nobody in the rest of the Pakistan squad has, it is his experience. That is probably what tempted the captain-coach pairing of Salman Agha and Mike Hesson to include him. Experience, as Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli displayed for India in their triumphant 2024 T20 World Cup campaign, does matter.

Both Rohit and Kohli did some honest self-assessment, and then reluctantly or not, adapted their batting to serve the team's collective ambition of scoring at a faster tempo. Babar, somehow, has never convinced anyone he has adapted to the fast-moving T20. Otherwise, it wouldn't have taken two days for him to get over Steven Smith's denied single during Sydney Sixers' BBL campaign.

T20 batting now demands batters targeting a match-up and taking the bowler on regardless of the phase of the game. Balls-per-boundary numbers are shrinking faster and even the technically fluent batters like Shubman Gill or a swashbuckler like Jos Buttler or Phil Salt think in sixes. On this Colombo afternoon, there was not a single shot from Babar that cleared the boundary. In contrast even Fakhar Zaman, who has been struggling for form, managed to slog sweep a few over the leg-side boundary.

Namibia might be an Associate on paper but they are no pushovers as India noticed in Delhi last week. But with smaller boundaries at the SSC and batting-friendly conditions, Babar will have a chance to make some noise. And he will need to keep making it otherwise the outside noise will not be muted anymore.