Major honours
A team whose identity is unpredictability itself. After partition in 1947, Pakistan earned Test status in 1952 and, just two years later in 1954, won a Test at the Oval on its first tour of England. Its finest hour came in Melbourne in 1992, when a team led by Imran Khan came within a game of group-stage elimination before beating England to lift the World Cup. Pakistan's biggest technical contribution to cricket is reverse swing — pioneered by Sarfraz Nawaz and perfected by Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis — which turns an old ball back into a weapon and rewrote the grammar of pace bowling. Pakistan also won the 2009 T20 World Cup and the 2017 Champions Trophy, thrashing India by 180 runs in the Oval final. After Sri Lanka's team bus was attacked in Lahore in 2009, Pakistan went a decade without hosting international cricket at home, using the UAE as a stand-in venue, before finally hosting a major tournament again by staging the 2025 Champions Trophy.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
Matches against India carry the heaviest political weight in cricket, and with bilateral series suspended, the teams now meet only at World Cups and the Asia Cup. Against England, Pakistan has twice fought for a world title, in the 1992 World Cup final and the 2022 T20 World Cup final.