Women's cricket failure

Seventeen years is long enough. Pakistan's women have now competed in every edition of the ICC Women's T20 World Cup since the tournament's inception in 2009 and have failed to advance past the group stage in each one. The 2026 edition in England has produced a similar result with the women in green suffering three heavy defeats leading to their elimination in the group stage, and a consolation win over debutants Netherlands.

The margin of defeats - 113 runs against Australia, 64 against India, 23 against Bangladesh - speak adequately for themselves. What demands examination is why, after nearly two decades, the answer to that question remains unchanged. PCB will offer its customary explanations. The team is young. The conditions in England were unfamiliar. The opposition were better prepared. All of this is true, and none of it is the point. Youth and unfamiliarity are consequences of decisions made long before the first ball is bowled at a World Cup. They are the product of a domestic programme that has never been built to produce internationally competitive women cricketers. PCB has long treated women's cricket as a secondary obligation, something to be fulfilled rather than invested in. While the men's programme cycles through high-performance camps and a domestic T20 circuit calibrated to international demands, the women's side plays a fraction of the competitive cricket required to harden a squad for a major tournament.

This country does produce talented women cricketers. The problem is that talent, without the infrastructure to develop it, produces nothing sustainable. A genuine commitment to women's cricket means a proper bilateral fixtures programme with genuine investment and a domestic competition calibrated to international conditions. Pakistan's women have earned better than this. Seventeen years of the same result is not misfortune. It is policy.