Sahibzada Farhan leapt in the air, pumped his fist, let out a roar. One hundred off 59 balls, against Sri Lanka, when Pakistan needed not just victory but demolition. The bat he’d held like a rifle five months ago–the gesture that brought politicians into press conferences and got the ICC issuing warnings–now pointed skyward. Just a bat. Just a celebration.
“I don’t know how people will take it,” he told reporters after that match in Dubai. “I don’t care about that.” At Pallekele tonight, the 29-year-old from Charsadda Kohli had scored 320 runs in 2014. Farhan crossed it in the sixth over with a boundary off Dasun Shanaka. By the nineteenth over, he had his second World Cup hundred, cementing his place as the tournament’s leading scorer. He has been Pakistan’s one consistent performer in a campaign of dropped catches, failed chases, and frantic net run rate calculations.
The journey to Pallekele had begun in Charsadda with tennis balls and tape. No hard-ball cricket existed there for a boy who wanted to play. His family moved to Peshawar in 2008 so he could get better schooling, but Farhan sneaked out during the day to practice at Peshawar Gymkhana Club. His father understood. His uncles didn’t see cricket as a proper career. They made him a fast bowler. Two years at the club, two or three games played, nothing achieved. He concentrated on studies, played tape-ball on the side. In 2011, a friend took him to a local game where Farhan excelled with the bat — cuts, pulls, attacking shots that made the friend insist he forget the past, restart as a batsman.
“I argued against doing this,” he told PakPassion.net in a 2017 interview. He played three games in a PCB inter-district tournament that year. Scores of 136, 149, 132. People started knowing his name.The method hasn’t changed. Clear the front leg. Free the arms. If a ball is there to be hit, smash it. Against Sri Lanka tonight, Fakhar Zaman gave him great support, but it was Farhan who Pakistan needed. The leading run-getter of the tournament, thirty-six runs shy of Kohli’s record when the match began with Pakistan needing to win by sixty-four runs to leapfrog New Zealand on net run rate.
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As always, he showed his simple rhythm: Wait, swing when the ball enters the arc, and watch it pass when it doesn’t. The opening stand–Pakistan’s highest ever in T20 world cup history – – reached one hundred in the tenth over. One hundred and sixty-three without loss in fifteen overs. They’d built the platform for a massive total, the kind Pakistan desperately needed.
Between 2012 and 2016, Farhan played Grade II cricket, scoring heavily in district Under-19s–167, 200 not out, numbers that should have guaranteed First-class selection. They didn’t. He needed help to make that jump. Peshawar coach Abdur Rehman had watched him play during district days, liked his batting style, and asked him to play First-class cricket in 2015. Appendicitis on the eve of his debut derailed everything. The whole season was about recovery from surgery. Only in October 2016 did he make his debut against HBL–Younis Khan, Ahmed Shehzad, Usman Shinwari were in the opposition.
“My nature is such that I am not overawed by the occasion or afraid of any opposition bowler,” he’d told PakPassion.net back then. He scored eighty-six in his first innings.
He certainly doesn’t get overawed. After the Asia Cup controversy, he unveiled a bat sticker called “Gunmode,” signaling he wouldn’t abandon the celebration despite the warnings. Pakistan lost that match by six wickets and the gesture–intended or not–overshadowed Farhan’s fifty-eight off forty-five balls. Tonight in Pallekele, the only gestures were Farhan’s leap at his century. The boy from Charsadda who was told to bowl fast but couldn’t, who argued against becoming a batsman but relented, had now rewritten T20 World Cup history.
“If a ball is there to be hit, I will try to smash it out of the park,” he had said in 2017. In Pallekele, February 28, 2026, that philosophy broke records.
