Pakistan squad for Sri Lanka Test series 2026: Full team lists for PAK vs SL home red-ball series originally appeared on Cricket News . Add Cricket News as a Preferred Source by clicking here .
Salman Ali Agha and Ali Usman return to the Pakistan Test squad after being sent home from England .
Mohammad Taha, Mohammad Suleman and Sameer Minhas have earned their maiden call-ups for the Sri Lanka series.
Babar Azam stays on as captain, with no place for Mohammad Rizwan or Imam-ul-Haq.
Pakistan have named a 14-member squad for the two-match home series against Sri Lanka, and the most notable names on it are the two players who were put on a plane home in the middle of the England tour in August.
Salman Ali Agha and Ali Usman are both back. Seven players were released from that touring party after the Lord's defeat, and only those two have found their way into this squad, with Mohammad Rizwan, Imam-ul-Haq, Aamir Jamal, Muhammad Awais Zafar and Khurram Shahzad all left out.
Salman's return is the sharper story of the two. He had captained Pakistan in the first Test of that series in Babar Azam's absence, was the twelfth man in the second, and was then removed from the squad entirely, with reports at the time saying he had been asked to appear before a committee over conduct on the West Indies and England tours.
Rizwan's absence has a separate explanation. He has been under inquiry by Pakistan's National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency since his phone was seized in London on the night the Lord's Test finished, and that matter remains unresolved.
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Mohammad Taha, Mohammad Suleman and Sameer Minhas have all received their first Test call-ups, and all three have come through on runs scored this season rather than on reputation.
Taha, a 26-year-old left-hander, leads the President's Trophy Grade-I run charts with 730 from seven matches, including three hundred and a best of 225. Suleman sits fifth on 652, also with three centuries, while Sameer has 405 in seven games in what is only his first first-class season after coming through the Under-19 setup.
Four of the players drafted in for the final Test at Edgbaston have kept their places, with Abdullah Fazal, Arafat Minhas, Razaullah and Saad Baig all retained. Two more fast bowlers will join once the PCB Patron's XI finish their three-day game against the tourists.
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Rawalpindi hosts the first Test from November 9 to 13, with the second at Lahore's Gaddafi Stadium from November 17 to 21.
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Sending seven players home mid-tour was presented as a line in the sand, and it came alongside a coaching change and seven replacements, five of them uncapped. Two months on, two of those seven are back, and the squad otherwise looks much like the one assembled in a hurry for Edgbaston.
That is not necessarily wrong. Salman Ali Agha captained the side in that series and has led Pakistan across formats, and a squad containing three debutants and very little Test batting experience needs someone who has been there. Discarding him permanently over an August decision would have been an overcorrection.
The problem is what it says about the original call. If Salman is selectable in November, the question of why he was sent home in September was never really answered, and the board has now created a situation where the men left out look punished and the ones brought back look forgiven, with nothing explained.
The squad itself is the other worry. Fourteen names and one frontline seamer in Mohammad Abbas, with two quicks to be added after a warm-up game finishes, do not make for the look of a settled plan. Pakistan are picking in-form domestic batters and working out the attack later, which can work on Rawalpindi and Lahore surfaces, but it is a thin way to start a home season.
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