Pakistan’s domestic cricket calendar is about to return to its most demanding format. The 69th edition of the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy, the country’s first-class competition, will get under way on November 3, bringing together twenty teams across two tiers and stretching the season deep into December. Defending champions Karachi Blues will return to protect a title they earned in a tournament that has, for decades, served as the sternest examination of a Pakistani cricketer’s temperament and technique.
The structure this season keeps the best of the recent format while giving more sides a genuine route to the top. Eight teams will contest the Gold tier, the elite division, while twelve sides will play in the parallel Silver competition. Matches will be spread across Islamabad, Abbottabad and Rawalpindi, a northern triangle of venues that will host the Gold tier through the late autumn, and the season will close with a final that runs from December 15 to December 19. In all, the Gold competition will feature twenty-nine first-class matches, each played over four days, which is a substantial block of red-ball cricket in a calendar increasingly crowded by shorter formats.
Teams and Groups in the Gold and Silver Tiers
The Gold tier brings together the eight strongest sides in the country. Karachi Blues head the field as holders, joined by Faisalabad, FATA, Lahore Whites, Islamabad, Peshawar, Multan and Sialkot Blue. That is a compact, competitive group in which every round matters, because only the top two teams at the end of the league phase will reach the final. There is little room for a slow start, and a single heavy defeat can leave a side chasing the table for weeks.
The Silver competition, meanwhile, is far more than a second division in name. Its twelve teams have been split into two groups of six, and the winners of each group will meet in a five-day final from December 3 to December 7. The group stage itself runs from November 3 to November 30 and will produce thirty-one first-class matches. For the sides involved, the prize is tangible: the Silver tournament acts as a qualifying pathway into the Gold tier for the following season, so promotion is a reward earned on the field.
Group A is made up of Lahore Blues, Rawalpindi, Larkana, Quetta, Bahawalpur and Peshawar Whites, and its matches will be played in Karachi at the KCCA Stadium and the SBP and UBL Sports Complexes. Group B brings together Karachi Whites, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad, Dera Murad Jamali, Abbottabad and Sialkot Whites, with fixtures at Multan Cricket Stadium, the Sports Complex in Rahim Yar Khan and Dring Stadium in Bahawalpur.
Babar Azam Against Shaheen Afridi in the Opening Round
The opening round has already delivered the kind of headline contest that domestic cricket needs. Pakistan Test captain Babar Azam will turn out for Lahore Whites, and his first assignment is a meeting with a FATA side led by Shaheen Shah Afridi at the Diamond Cricket Ground in Islamabad. It is a duel between two of the country’s most recognisable cricketers, and it will be watched closely not only for the result but for what it says about both men in the longer format. Babar’s presence in the domestic game is itself significant: when senior internationals play first-class cricket, the standard of the whole competition rises, and younger players learn more from sharing a dressing room and a field with them than from any coaching session.
Coverage will also be wider than in past seasons. All four Gold-tier matches in each round will be live-streamed on Tamasha and tapmad, while four of the six Silver matches in each round will also be available through live streaming. Supporters who once had to rely on scorecards and short reports will now be able to follow sessions ball by ball, and selectors will know that performances are being watched in real time rather than reconstructed afterwards.
That visibility is important because the Quaid-e-Azam Trophy has always been more than a trophy. It is the competition where Pakistan’s Test hopefuls prove that they can bat for long hours, bowl long spells and hold their concentration across four days. A big hundred in this tournament still carries weight in selection meetings, and a bowler who takes wickets consistently here earns a hearing that no white-ball cameo can buy. The two-tier format sharpens that test further, because the Gold sides know that Silver teams are pushing from below, and the Silver sides know that a strong season can carry them into the elite group.
There are questions the season will answer as it unfolds. Can Karachi Blues defend their crown against a Gold field with no weak side? Will the Silver final produce a promoted team ready to survive at the higher level? And will the opening-round meeting between Babar and Shaheen set the tone for a season in which the country’s biggest names treat domestic cricket as a priority? The answers will come over the next seven weeks, starting on November 3, in a tournament that is the truest measure of Pakistan’s first-class strength.
