Why International Cricket is the only ledger that matters

There is a cruel honesty to cricket's record books. They remember where you scored, not how many. They remember when you scored, not how often. And above all, they remember who you scored against and what was at stake. 

This is the uncomfortable truth that hangs over Babar Azam's career in 2026, a career that by almost any statistical measure should be celebrated as one of the finest of his generation, yet continues to invite a particular kind of scrutiny that his defenders find baffling and his critics consider entirely earned.

The numbers that both sides cite

Babar's supporters have a strong case on paper. In all-T20 cricket, his unbeaten 52-ball 100 for Peshawar Zalmi against Quetta Gladiators in PSL 2026 took his tally to 12 centuries in the format — second only to Chris Gayle's 22, and ahead of David Warner and Virat Kohli. 

He is also the fastest batter to reach 12,000 T20 runs, doing so in just 338 innings — quicker than both Kohli (360) and Gayle (344). His T20 average of 42.72 is the best among batters with at least 10,000 runs in the format, and he is the leading run-scorer in PSL history with more than 4,000 runs.

In T20Is specifically, the picture is more modest but still creditable. He has three T20I centuries, making him the only Pakistani with more than one hundred in the format. 

In ODIs, where he has 20 centuries — equalling Saeed Anwar's Pakistan record — he has long been considered a top-three white-ball batter in the world when in form.

These are not small achievements. They are the kind of numbers that, in a vacuum, would secure a cricketer's place in the pantheon.

But cricket is not played in a vacuum, and this is where the argument pivots. Because the question that follows Babar — the question that followed him through a disappointing 2023 World Cup, through Pakistan's early Super 8 exit at the 2026 T20 World Cup, through the captaincy resignation, through declining stature in Test cricket and the quiet fade from automatic selection — is not whether he can score runs. 

It is whether he scores them when the match, the series, or the tournament actually hangs in the balance.

What international cricket remembers?

Franchise cricket has a short memory. The PSL, the IPL, the BBL and the CPL generate highlight reels, million-dollar contracts and social media reverence, but they do not build the legends that get passed between generations. 

A ten-year-old asking their father about cricket's greats does not hear stories about the 2018 Caribbean Premier League final. They hear about Kapil Dev at Tunbridge Wells, about Aravinda de Silva at Lahore in 1996, about Dhoni's helicopter six at the Wankhede. 

International cricket — and particularly the knockout stages of global tournaments — is the only arena where performances are preserved with something approaching permanence.

Consider Kohli. He holds the record for most runs in T20 World Cup history (1,292), most fifty-plus scores in the tournament (15), and most Player of the Match awards in T20 World Cup history (8). 

He is the only player to win the Player of the Tournament award twice (2014 and 2016), and across T20 World Cup knockout matches alone he has scored 373 runs at an average of 93.25. 

When India finally won the T20 World Cup in 2024, he delivered 76 off 59 in the final after a quiet tournament — and was named Player of the Match. A year later, in the 2025 Champions Trophy that India also won, he scored an unbeaten century against Pakistan in the group stage and 84 in the semi-final against Australia. 

The scoreboard that history keeps does not care about the matches you got out cheaply in; it cares about the nights the trophy was handed over. 

This is the context in which Babar going past Kohli on the T20 centurions list, or overtaking him on all-T20 hundreds, matters less than it should. Kohli's ledger is weighted toward the games cricket remembers.

Chris Gayle, for all his reputation as a franchise mercenary, was central to two T20 World Cup triumphs for West Indies (2012 and 2016) and a Champions Trophy title in 2004. 

His 117 against South Africa at the 2007 T20 World Cup was the first century in men's T20I cricket, and his 100 not out off 48 balls against England at the Wankhede in the 2016 group stage — at a World Cup, West Indies went on to win — included 11 sixes, the most in any T20 World Cup innings at the time.

He is tied with Sahibzada Farhan for the most centuries in T20 World Cup history with two. The point is not that Gayle was a consistent international batter; he often wasn't. 

The point is that in the tournaments that matter, he showed up, and the West Indies' two global T20 titles cannot be told without him.

David Warner offers perhaps the most instructive parallel for Babar's defenders. Like Babar, Warner has sometimes been accused of front-running — of scoring heavily against weaker attacks and going quiet in the hardest moments. 

And yet Warner's international resume is ultimately defined by the opposite: 345 runs in Australia's 2015 World Cup-winning campaign (second-highest for his side), 535 runs in their 2023 World Cup-winning campaign, and the Player of the Tournament award at the 2021 T20 World Cup, where he scored 289 runs including a 53 off 38 in the final itself against New Zealand. 

Four global trophies — two ODI World Cups, a T20 World Cup, and a World Test Championship — sit on his mantelpiece. The IPL title with Sunrisers Hyderabad and other franchise cricket dominance are footnotes beside this.

The Babar comparison

This is the ledger against which Babar's international record is being read. His three T20I centuries have come against South Africa, England, and New Zealand, and while each is a fine innings in isolation, none has come at a global tournament despite representing Pakistan in four editions. 

His ODI record remains genuinely excellent in bilateral series, but Pakistan's 2023 World Cup campaign — where they failed to qualify for the semi-finals — produced a 74 against Afghanistan in a losing cause rather than the tournament-defining innings his then top-three ranking demanded. 

Pakistan's 2024 T20 World Cup ended in a group-stage exit after a defeat to the United States. The 2026 T20 World Cup, by multiple accounts, ended in a Super 8 exit amid questions about fitness and selection.

None of this erases what Babar has done. But it clarifies why the conversation around him has shifted. When Pakistani fans and former cricketers criticise him, they are not arguing that he is a poor batter. 

They are arguing something far more specific and far harder to dispute: that the runs he has piled up in PSL fixtures and bilateral series do not, in cricket's long memory, count the same as the runs Kohli scored in Melbourne in 2022, or the runs Warner scored in Dubai in 2021, or the runs Gayle scored in 2016.

Why is this standard fair?

There is a version of this argument that is unfair to Babar — one that ignores the collective failures of Pakistani cricket's selection, coaching and administrative chaos over the past three years, and pins a team's dysfunction on a single batter. 

Pakistan's bowling attack in the 2023 World Cup was genuinely depleted. Their fielding standards have been publicly questioned by their own captain. The captaincy itself has changed hands with a frequency that would destabilise any senior player.

But there is also a version of the argument that is simply true: the players who are remembered as greats are remembered because they produced their best cricket on the biggest stages, and this is the standard that every top-order international batter is ultimately measured against. 

Kohli's reputation does not rest on his IPL numbers, extraordinary though they are. Warner's does not rest on his BBL or SRH dominance. 

Gayle is remembered as a great of T20 cricket not primarily because of his 22 T20 centuries but because two of those centuries came at T20 World Cups, and because he walked off the field twice with winners' medals.

Babar, at 31, still has time to rewrite the part of his record that currently draws criticism. The 52-ball hundred in PSL 2026 suggests the skill has not gone anywhere. 

What the next ICC tournament will reveal is whether the skill can travel from the National Stadium in a domestic fixture to the same ground, or any ground, with a semi-final or final on the line.

Cricket's record books are not cruel because they distort the truth. They are cruel because they tell it. Runs in franchise cricket make careers comfortable. Runs in international cricket, and especially in its knockout stages, make careers immortal. That is the ledger Babar is still writing — and the one against which, fairly or not, he will finally be judged.

Meanwhile, an opposing view worth considering is the growing influence and prestige of franchise leagues, combined with the physical and mental toll of packed international schedules, is genuinely shifting how modern cricket should be evaluated. 

Some argue that a T20 century against an elite IPL or PSL attack is cricket of a higher standard than an ODI hundred against a weak bilateral opponent.

There is also a reasonable case that Pakistan's institutional dysfunction — not any single player — is the primary reason for their recent ICC tournament failures. These arguments do not fully absolve Babar, but they complicate the narrative in ways the traditional "big-match player" framing sometimes flattens.