Pakistan have included four uncapped players for their eight upcoming limited-overs matches in New Zealand.
Pakistan have named their squads for the five T20Is and three ODIs in New Zealand. There were quite a few interesting omissions from both squads. Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan will not be part of the T20Is, where Salman Ali Agha would lead them. For the ODIs, they have left out Shaheen Shah Afridi and Haris Rauf as well as the injured Saim Ayub and Fakhar Zaman.
Pakistan squads for New Zealand tour:
T20Is: Salman Ali Agha (c), Hassan Nawaz, Omair Yousuf, Mohammad Haris, Abdul Samad, Irfan Niazi, Khushdil Shah, Shadab Khan, Abbas Afridi, Jahandad Khan, Mohammad Ali, Shaheen Shah Afridi, Haris Rauf, Sufiyan Muqeem, Abrar Ahmed, Usman Khan.
ODIs: Mohammad Rizwan (c), Salman Ali Agha, Abdullah Shafique, Abrar Ahmed, Akif Javed, Babar Azam, Faheem Ashraf, Imam-ul-Haq, Khushdil Shah, Mohammad Ali, Mohammad Wasim Jr, Irfan Niazi, Naseem Shah, Sufiyan Muqeem, Tayyab Tahir.
Pakistan’s four new faces
Abdul Samad (T20Is)
The most remarkable of the four picks, Samad does not keep wicket, rarely bowls, and, at 27 is yet to make his PSL debut or hit a T20 fifty.
So why did they pick him? Perhaps the answer lies in his T20 strike rate of 146, albeit across only 16 innings and 164 balls. This includes, most famously, a violent 15-ball 25 against India A in the T20 Emerging Teams Asia Cup of 2024. There is a recency factor too: playing for the Markhors in the Champions T20 Cup this December, Samad hit a nine-ball 34 and a 20-ball 41 in consecutive innings. Across these 29 balls, he hit five fours and seven sixes. He did little else in the tournament, but topped the strike rates chart.
Akif Javed (ODIs)
Left-arm seamer Akif bowls at brisk pace, and can get the ball to take off from a length to surprise the batter. He has not played in the PSL since 2023, but earned BPL contracts for both 2024 and 2025. In BPL 2025, he had a run of 10-84 across three games and finished the edition with 20 wickets at 14.30.
It seemed inevitable that he would earn a national call-up at some point, but probably in T20Is before ODIs. His List A numbers (33 wickets at 36, economy 6.07) do not stand out.
Hassan Nawaz (T20Is)
Only 22, Nawaz opens batting in T20 cricket and can keep wicket – in other words, a like-for-like replacement for Rizwan. At 131, his scoring rate is slower than Samad’s, but he does dig deeper. With 312 runs (only seven fewer than Hussain Talat), he finished as the second-highest run-scorer in the recent Champions T20 Cup – while striking at 142.
Mohammad Ali (T20Is and ODIs)
Unlike the three others, Ali has played four Test matches – though his innocuous seam bowling has produced only six wickets at 67.67. In domestic cricket, however, he has been good in all three formats. While 47 List A wickets at 31.27 do not seem impressive, an economy of exactly five perhaps does.
In T20s, he has 58 wickets at a ridiculous 15.13 while going at 15.13 an over. This included a stellar PSL 2024, where his 19 wickets (at 18.63) were the second-most in the tournament, and the Champions T20 Cup, where he topped the wickets chart with 22 scalps at an eye-watering 9.72.
