Pakistan Women

Sana Mir became the first Pakistani woman to take 100 One Day International wickets and to play a hundred games in both ODIs and T20Is, an achievement that carried her into the ICC Hall of Fame in 2025. She built her career inside a team that had needed a fight simply to take the field: when sisters Shaiza and Sharmeen Khan put together Pakistan's first women's side in 1996, they did so against death threats and public protests, and it took until January 1997 for the side to play its opening ODI, against New Zealand in Christchurch. A Test debut, against Sri Lanka in Colombo, followed the next year. Administrative order came later still — the Pakistan Cricket Board only brought women's cricket under one roof in 2005, ending a period of rival boards.

The team plays in green and white, which is where the nickname Women in Green comes from, and trains out of the National Cricket Academy in Lahore while fielding domestically through franchise sides such as the PCB Blasters and Dynamites. Its clearest run of success came at the Asian Games, where gold medals in 2010 and 2014 both came at Bangladesh's expense in the final. The ACC Women's T20 Asia Cup has been less kind: runners-up finishes in 2012 and 2016 both ended in defeat to the same opponent, India.

That rivalry defines the calendar more than any other fixture. It carries the weight of India–Pakistan cricket generally, and recent meetings have done little to ease it — at the 2023 T20 World Cup, India chased down 151 for 3 with overs to spare, the kind of chase that keeps the fixture as sharp as ever.