How Saim Ayub became Pakistan's unlikely allrounder

Saim Ayub was an odd choice for a new bowling coach to hone in on. In 27 T20Is until May 2025, he had sent down just five overs, and a smattering more in the recently concluded PSL season. His value to his side lay 22 yards the other side of the pitch, where Ayub's explosiveness made him arguably the most exciting Pakistani T20 batter of his generation.

Former Australian fast bowler Ashley Noffke, primarily brought in to put Pakistan's quicks through their paces as bowling coach, had only been in the job a few days. But he appeared to be keeping an especially close eye on Pakistan's young star opener, and extremely irregular part-time slow bowler.

"Until then, I had no idea how to bowl," Ayub tells ESPNcricinfo. "I'd been bowling from club cricket, but I didn't know I could bowl at this level."

Four months later, Ayub was one of the best bowlers in the Asia Cup, and Pakistan's most economical in their heartbreaking last-over loss to India. The fateful decision to remove him from the attack with India on the ropes and reintroduce pace bowler Haris Rauf is often considered the moment the trophy slipped out of Pakistan's hands. Today, he is, according to ICC rankings, the world's best T20I allrounder.

***

"Shall we just stand here?"

Ayub halts suddenly mid-gait. The Pakistan side has just finished training ahead of Australia's visit for a three-match series. The late evening haze has thinned as night begins to settle in Lahore. The rest of the squad packs up to pile into the team bus which takes them to their hotel. We're a few feet away from the seats at the dugout.

"It gets chilly this time, and I'll begin to freeze if we sit down," he says. A bitter cold wave that swept Lahore has only just passed, but with his body cooling down again after a three-hour training session, the nip is beginning to bite Pakistan's premier opener.

Ayub is no less keen to talk cricket on his feet, perhaps unsurprisingly for a player whose decision-making on the fly is so integral to his success with Pakistan. The nation has long moved on from the time a decade earlier when the art of power-hitting seemed to have been buried alongside Shahid Afridi's final retirement. Now, big-hitting Pakistan players are scattered across international leagues. Haider Ali, Mohammad Haris, Hasan Nawaz have all drifted in and out of Pakistan's T20 setup, one often replacing the other as Pakistan's selection preferences waxed and waned based on the most recent performances and the caprices of public opinion.

Ayub, however, has stayed. While the others struggled to make the step up into the suffocating scrutiny of the national team, either shrinking from the challenge or changing what made them successful in the first place, the core tenets of Ayub's game remain much the same: a laser-beam focus on working out the best attacking options while refraining from low-percentage hacking that intent is so often confused with. It is that, rather than what may keep him in the side the longest, that informs his decision making.

"It wasn't my decision to come into the Pakistan side, and it won't be my decision when I leave it," Ayub says. "That is uncontrollable. The controllable thing is the work I put in my game and the belief I have in myself. If I'm not performing and I'm removed from the team, I'll come back because of my game. Getting into the team is not the goal. To be an elite cricketer when I'm about to retire, having performed at the top of my game - that is the goal. To play for Pakistan just to keep cementing your place isn't success; the results you get are success."

Ayub gave a brilliant first glimmer of what he meant when he was recalled to the Pakistan side in 2024, having been dropped for the first time following an inauspicious eight games to kickstart his international career. He went to the CPL that year, ending up three runs shy of topping the charts at a strike-rate over 142, leading Guyana Amazon Warriors to the title with an unbeaten 52 in the final. When called up to play the T20I series in New Zealand in January 2024, he had come back, as he might put it "because of my game".

Far from looking to hold on to his place this time, Ayub turned on the afterburners in his first game back. With Pakistan pursuing an improbable 227 at Eden Park, Ayub pummelled 27 off eight balls. Having slapped Tim Southee through cover off to kick the innings off, he unveiled what has become his signature stroke later in the over, picking the ball up off the length and lapping it over fine leg for six without so much as lifting his gaze to follow it over the boundary.

That innings, perhaps, explains why Ayub says he hasn't set any personal goals like "scoring hundreds of runs" at Pakistan's upcoming T20 World Cup campaign in Sri Lanka; it was, after all, that eight-ball innings that catapulted him to national prominence. He smiles as the memory of that innings dazzles brightly in his mind.

"It gave me the confidence I belong here," he says. "I wasn't doing anything special that day, or that I'd play the no-look shot. You work, and you work hard, and you work smart to try to keep improving. When you get results you can never know. You just keep putting in the effort."

Ayub takes those bright lights in his stride now, but you don't need to go far back to remember when he looked every bit a rabbit blinded by their brilliance. It was 2021 when Quetta Gladiators unveiled a waifish 18-year old as their emerging player pick, and then threw him in at No. 4 in the PSL's opening game. He scratched around for 8 off 14 balls with none of the flair we take for granted today as he poked and prodded anxiously. That struggle continued all campaign, where he managed 114 runs at a strike rate of 108.57 in seven innings. So meagre was the impression he left that he went unpicked at the 2022 draft.

Cricket shots, Ayub says, don't change as you move up the age levels, but he was, he acknowledges, a boy among men. "The problem was I had come straight from Under-19 to the PSL. I had no idea how to deal with Mohammad Amir, Hasan Ali or Shaheen Afridi running in to bowl at you, and Chris Gayle was batting at the other end. There was a huge crowd, and it was overwhelming. I was not in the present moment.

"In Under-19s, you play on the side pitches; there's no crowd. There's a huge difference. After that Quetta season, I played domestic cricket. I played for Sindh Second XI. Then we played three-day cricket before I went from second XI to first XI, and first XI to the PSL. When you perform from that base upwards, playing all kinds of cricket, then the platform is much more stable. You have confidence at the PSL, and you've been groomed properly. That's why you should play domestic cricket before rising to a higher level."

That drive to improve is a pattern with Ayub, whose career, even at 23, has been marked by constant adaptation. He may be a big-hitting T20 player, but he's one of a select group of three-format regulars in Pakistan. When he had a horror run with the bat in the Asia Cup, which he began with three ducks and finished with 37 runs in seven matches, his warp-speed transformation as an elite finger spinner protected his place in the side. And even though he has not been tossed around the T20 batting line-up as so many players of his ilk tend to be, he has opened with six different partners in 59 innings, each affecting how he paces his own innings.

"You have to be a team man," Ayub shrugs. "I believe I should stay flexible. If you're not, you can't play three formats. There's a world of difference between Tests, ODIs and T20s. You have to react to different situations; there are thousands of types of different situations. So when I'm batting with different partners, that kind of thing stands me in good stead.

"I think your game evolves more the more cricket you play. It's not about T20 cricket specifically but T20 is a shorter format and a faster game so you have to be sharper in your mind. That is the main thing you have to get experience of T20 cricket for - to be quicker with your decision-making."

***

It is, though, the bowling potential Noffke managed to eke out of Ayub which gives Pakistan the ultimate luxury of a two-in-one player, especially heading to a T20 World Cup. Since that series against Bangladesh in May, only Mohammad Nawaz and Abrar Ahmed have bowled more overs for Pakistan than Ayub, and only four bowlers have taken more wickets.

While most effective through the middle overs - where he concedes at barely over a run a ball - he has also been thrown in at the deep end, bowling some of the trickiest overs in the powerplay. "It's not easy to bowl in the powerplay, but you have to be very tight, and the margins are very small. The batter will punish you for the slightest mistake."

There he has developed a knack of breaking through, nearly half of his wickets in this time coming with the fielding restrictions active. It has been aided by an array of variations Ayub deploys so cannily, from legspinners and wrong'uns to flippers and carrom balls. "Ashley Noffke guided me very well," he says.

Ayub made some adjustments to his bowling run-up and stride, building a rapport with the bowling coach. Progress wasn't linear or immediately obvious, but the relationship of trust they built appears to be paying dividends.

"He essentially taught me how to bowl. Until then, I had no idea how to really bowl. Mein bas jaa ke ball daal deta tha (I just used to amble up and turn my arm over). But bringing varieties in and bringing strategy to it, that credit goes to the bowling coach."

Even so, Ayub waves aside any notion of his centrality to Pakistan's chances at the T20 World Cup. "Let's see," he says breezily. "There are two grounds in Colombo where we're playing. One has high-scoring matches, the other is more spin-friendly. When we go there, we'll have a look. If it's spinning, then I'll have a big role, like I had at the Asia Cup where there were slow, spin wickets. Wherever the behaviour of the pitch on the ball will slow it down, our coach will want me to bowl when the opportunity comes."

That dual role has become a solid buffer against any threat to his place in Pakistan's starting XI but that, too, Pakistan's young opener dismisses with a smile.

"No, that doesn't matter. That would only be true if I became worried about my place in the side because if I was out of form with the bat. I don't think in those terms."

A gentle breeze begins to whisper through Gaddafi's vast open expanse. A little shiver runs through Ayub, and he glances up and zips his jacket further up. He's keen to get back to the warmth of the team bus. Ayub is, as he promised, controlling the controllables.