Following a controversy surrounding the issuing of NOCs to Pakistan players for the league, Babar was granted permission by the PCB to appear in the tournament and had an immediate impact.

Opening the batting, Babar scored a fifty in his first game of the season, anchoring a low run-chase of 121 against Sylhet Strikers on a tricky Mirpur surface. At 39-6, Rangpur looked down and out before Babar stitched an unbeaten 86-run partnership with Azmatullah Omarzai to take his team to victory.

The next game was a disappointment as he struggled his way to two off eight balls in a run-chase of 161. Rangpur lost the game by 28 runs.

Two games into the season, Babar’s tally read 58 off 57 balls. Recently, Pakistan had moved him down to No.3 in the T20I side with an aim to get quicker starts than the pair of Rizwan and Babar would usually provide. With a strike rate of just about run-a-ball in the first two games of BPL 2024, voices questioning Babar’s quality as a T20 batter started getting louder again.

Run-scoring has never been a concern for the former Pakistan captain, even in the shortest format. He is on the verge of reaching 10,000 T20 runs at a ridiculous average of 43.72. No one in the history of the format has scored more at a better average.

This puts into perspective Babar’s approach. In a team where only one other batter has averaged 30 so far and only one other batter has managed to score a fifty, Babar was the binding force. He provided solidity, which has far greater importance at the BPL than at other franchise leagues around the globe.

There can be no better representation of the effectiveness of Babar’s ‘slow’ batting than the fact that on each of the five occasions where he scored 35-plus, Rangpur won, and the only time he didn’t, they lost.

His 62 off 46 against Dhaka enabled Rangpur to set 183, 79 more than what was required in the end. His 37 off 36 provided a platform for the finishers to take Rangpur to 165, a par score which proved eight runs too many for Comilla.

Babar finished his campaign with twin 47s – off 37 balls against Sylhet and off 43 balls against Dhaka. On both occasions, Rangpur scored more than 160 batting first as Babar’s reliability allowed other batters in the middle order to take the necessary risks.

With more than half the tournament still to go, Babar is set to be displaced as the highest run-scorer soon. 251 runs at a strike rate of 114.6 in a T20 campaign will not make for pretty reading a few months down the line and will be added to the list of arguments used against his quality as a T20 batter. It won’t belong there, however.