Two Teams, One Trophy: The President's Final Nobody Saw Coming

Dr. Annelies De Vos · 2026-10-23

The President's Trophy 2026-27 is down to its last match, and it's a pairing almost no one would have predicted back in September. State Bank of Pakistan and Markhor IT Solutions will meet in the five-day final at the SBP ground in Karachi, with play scheduled to start on October 25. Here's the fun part: this will be the first first-class fixture of the season played in Karachi. Every single match before it took place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. So the final isn't just a title decider — it's a homecoming of sorts. ### How They Got Here Both sides locked up their spots after the seventh and final round of the round-robin stage. They went into that last round sitting first and second in the eight-team standings, and neither blinked. State Bank finished on top, Markhor right behind them. ### Markhor's Rookie Run Markhor IT Solutions are playing first-class cricket for the first time, and they're doing it in a final. They picked up 96 points from seven matches and won two of them. The start wasn't pretty — no wins in their first four games. Then round five happened, and they beat OGDCL by 75 runs. After that came a draw with State Bank in round six and a six-wicket win over Pakistan TV to close out the group stage. Their promotion to the top tier came back in July, when they were declared grade-II winners on the strength of a first-innings lead over Kingsmen. Not bad for a debut season, right? ### State Bank's Unbeaten Slog State Bank of Pakistan went through the entire group stage without a loss. Nobody else managed that. Their 107 points were the only total above 100 in the whole competition. Two of their matches ended in wins — against Ghani in round three and OGDCL in round four. The other five were draws. Steady, patient, and clearly hard to beat. ### The Rest of the Table Kingsmen earned promotion to next year's first-class President's Trophy with an 82-run win over Eshaal Associates. They'll join their sister team Kingsmen Academy, who finished third this season. Kingsmen take the place of OGDCL, who ended bottom for the second year running. OGDCL's story is a bit of a rollercoaster. They'd been relegated to grade-II gold last year, then returned to the first-class event after the Pakistan Cricket Board removed WAPDA and Saahir Associates for failing to meet pre-season regulations. Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited sealed OGDCL's fate in the last round, beating Khan Research Laboratories by four wickets in Rawalpindi and chasing down 191. Mohammad Rizwan came back as captain and scored 64 in the first innings, while Abdul Samad finished unbeaten on 69 in the chase. Imam-ul-Haq also returned to domestic cricket in round seven, scoring an unbeaten 200 as OGDCL's captain. Hussain Talat and Ali Razzaq hit centuries for Ghani, which helped them hold on for a draw. ### What Comes Next The first-class Quaid-e-Azam Trophy starts on November 1, with twenty teams from 16 regions split into gold and silver divisions. But first, there's a trophy to lift in Karachi. So here's the question worth asking: can an unbeaten State Bank side hold off a debut team that's already beaten the odds once? Five days of cricket will tell us.