Salman Agha

The lingering suspicion with Salman Agha is that at some point, the mask would slip, and his inadequacies in international cricket would finally be undeniably exposed. Agha's achievement, though, is the length of time he's managed to keep that eventuality at bay.

Agha had been on the domestic circuit for over nine years to steady, unremarkable effect, averaging under 40 with the bat while throwing in some part-time spin. When a gap opened up in the lower middle order as Faheem Ashraf fell out of favour, no one clamoured for Agha, but when he was called up for a Test series in Sri Lanka, his life changed.

Not because he transformed into a world-beater, but because he didn't allow the step up to a higher level to affect his underlying numbers. Three half-centuries and a hundred in his first six Tests saw him blend into the furniture of the national team, unremarkably but also unquestionably. Those runs - nearly all scored from No. 7 or 8 - buttressed the batting line-up while offering cover to an oft-vulnerable top four.

Agha was at the forefront of perhaps Pakistan's most impressive Test series performance this decade, named Player of the Series when they swept Sri Lanka aside 2-0 away in 2023, scoring 221 runs for just one dismissal. But aside from those flashes of superstardom, Agha has done what worked for him, contributing useful runs while somehow managing to keep the attention on the team rather than the individual. A move further up the order could place a different kind of pressure on him, but it is not a challenge he has yet been tasked with.

That rise to seniority has been replicated, against even longer odds, in the white-ball formats. ODI cricket was a more natural home for a solid, unspectacular player of his ilk, and he's made good on his promise of consistency, an average just south of 40 in the lower middle order acting as a rudder in an otherwise combustible batting line-up. His middle-over utility, particularly with regards to rotating the strike against spin, tends to prevent Pakistan getting bogged down, even if he lacks the talent to turn a game around in the tradition of the archetypical unpredictable Pakistan batter.

His T20I arc is harder to parse. Nowhere near what a modern T20 batter might look like, he was appointed captain in his fourth game after full-time leader Mohammad Rizwan was rested against Zimbabwe in December 2024. One series later, he had assumed the role full-time, and somehow retained it through both a change of coach and philosophy. Once more, there has been no immediate transformation; Agha tried to up the ante in terms of his intent, but questions about his strike rate have never truly gone away.

However, within the span of three years, Agha went from a journeyman domestic cricketer to a Pakistan captain and all-format regular in one of the more seamless transitions from domestic to international cricket which, on its own, gives him some rebuttal against allegations of mediocrity.