Sometimes the world throws up a scenario so dripping in irony you can’t help but chuckle. Throughout this year’s T20 World Cup, and indeed most of the recent past, the discourse in Pakistan cricket has been dominated by a single, agonising question: what do you do with a problem like Babar Azam?
He’s been deified, blasphemed, supplanted and reinstated. And while a lesser player might have been given shorter shrift, with Babar there is always more at stake. He is, in a word, adored. Yet, in the shortest format, he has certainly put that adoration to the test.
His PSL 2025 season was a slog: 288 runs at a strike rate of 128.57, despite having struck at above 140 in each of his two seasons prior to that. With the national side, the numbers were bleaker; 2025 brought him 206 runs at a paltry strike rate of 114.44, his 2026 only nominally better, striking at 117.60.
Then came the PSL 2026. Suddenly, Babar is striking north of 140 and averaging a preposterous 80.83. How so? Well, that turn in fortune has come about from the unlikeliest of sources, one of Sri Lankan cricket’s favourite scapegoats: Kusal Mendis.
Despite the shadow Babar casts, this article is as much about Mendis – the sometimes vilified, occasionally flawed, and most definitely polarising opener, who just so happens to be in the form of his life. The numbers alone are elite: nine innings, 500 runs, one hundred – the first by a Sri Lankan in the PSL – and four fifties, three of which came in consecutive games, an average of 62.50 and a strike rate of 170.64.
The eye test is even more revealing. Mendis has always been a monster square of the wicket, one capable of collapsing that back leg like a spring to pull anything short of a length, while equally adept at slog sweeping spinners with disdain. But we are now seeing Mendis skip down the track to target the V against spin; he’s taking on seamers down the ground too, such as when he memorably lofted Hasan Ali over long-on with a textbook straight bat.
At 31, Mendis is certainly looking a batter rejuvenated, and seems to be somewhat belatedly adding new-age strings to his otherwise fairly orthodox bow.
The chuckle-inducing irony is that this purple patch is happening in a vacuum. Following a government directive to conserve fuel amidst the West Asia crisis, the PSL has barred spectators. The stands are empty; the terraces are silent.
But while for most, a stadium without fans would be a tragedy, for Babar and Mendis, it is perhaps precisely that which has been the secret sauce.
We saw this phenomenon in football, in the English Premier League, during Covid-19. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Manchester United played their most fluid football in a decade during the “Project Restart” era. Players whose big-game mentalities were constantly questioned were suddenly freed, playing with a clarity indistinguishable from a high-intensity training session.
The current iterations of Babar and Mendis might be ‘training-ground players’ in the best sense. Both endure overwhelming, often toxic, scrutiny. For Mendis, no match-winning knock can stave off the ‘haters’ the moment a lean spell arrives. He has spoken openly about the mental toll of social media negativity and how the burden of captaincy – circa 2023 – made carefree cricket feel impossible at times. Even as recently as this year’s World Cup, it was clear that Mendis was a player shackled by responsibility, asked to bat deep and anchor, when it’s long been clear his best role was as a top-order destabiliser.
But in this ghost-town PSL, Mendis has seemingly found his cricketing soulmate. In Babar, he has a partner happy to anchor and play the percentages, allowing Mendis to hunt without fear.
Though there is a cruel paradox at play here. The fans would have given anything to witness this version of Babar, this liberated master scoring his fastest-ever PSL century against Quetta Gladiators. But the reality is that if those thousands of voices were in the stands, this version of Babar and Mendis might never have appeared at all.
Instead, they are thriving in the silence because, for the first time in their careers, the only voices they have to listen to are their own.
