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Here at the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) Stadium, the teenaged left-handed opening batsman Nasir Jamshed gave the national selector a big nudge. He scored a magnificent career-best 182 for the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Patron’s XI against the touring Zimbabweans, on the second day of a four-day warm-up match.
The selectors must have sat up and noticed the 18-year-old from Lahore, as he made his runs in his team’s total of 361 for three, off a mere 240 deliveries in five hours 41 minutes with the help of 20 fours and as many as six strokes over the boundary.
Born on December 6, 1989, Nasir plays for National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) for whom he totalled an exact 800 runs at an average of 53.33 in the recently-concluded Quaid-e-Azam Trophy Championship. He was only 13 years old in 2003 when he first appeared for the Pakistan Under-19s on their tour of Sri Lanka back in 2003-04.
Nasir also played for the champion Pakistan team in the Under-19s World Cup competition in Sri Lanka in early 2006. Previously, he was a part of the Pakistan team in the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) Under-17 Championship played in India in 2003-04.
When he appeared in his first Youth Test match for the Pakistan Under-19s, against Sri Lanka at Quaid-e-Azam Park here in the Pakistan Steel Mills Township in the 2004-05 season, he immediately made his mark with a monumental 204, off 387 balls with 28 fours. In the first innings, his contribution was 44 runs.
In 22 first-class matches until Tuesday evening, Nasir had scored 1,425 runs in his career at an average of 41.91. These have included four hundreds and four half-centuries. The way he manipulated the strike during his knock of 182 yesterday, and the number of boundaries that he hit, should be able to catapult Nasir into the sight of the national selectors when they get together to name the Pakistan squad for the five-match One-day International series against Zimbabwe.
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