Babar Azam Joins Sydney Sixers: The King's Arrival in BBL 2026
Cricket news rarely makes me put my chai down. This one did. Babar Azam — the King, as every household in Pakistan calls him — has signed with the Sydney Sixers for the Big Bash League's 2025-26 season, and from Karachi to Peshawar the mood is pure, unfiltered pride. It is one of the biggest signings of a Pakistani player in BBL history, at the ground where he already owns a piece of our hearts.
Why the SCG already belongs to him
Babar has happy history at the Sydney Cricket Ground. In the 2023 New Year's Test he scored a century against an Australian attack led by Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon, on a wearing pitch, in an innings built on patience and pure shot selection. The SCG crowd — famously stingy with applause for visiting batsmen — gave him an ovation. The ground respects classical batting, and Babar is the most classical batsman of his era: 13,000-plus international runs, more than 30 international centuries, averages of 47 in Tests, 56 in ODIs and 41 in T20Is.
What he brings the Sixers
The Sixers are the BBL's most successful franchise — three titles, a settled culture under Greg Shipperd, Moises Henriques still wearing the armband. Around him the batting is full of strokemakers: Josh Philippe, James Vince, Jordan Silk. What it lacked was a trunk. Babar at No. 3 is exactly that — the man who bats through the middle overs, milks spin better than anyone alive, and lets the hitters hit around him. Expect him to feast on the leg-spin and left-arm orthodox he will face, and do not be surprised if he is promoted in chases.
And then there is the dressing-room picture: Babar and Steve Smith, two of the era's great batting minds, trading notes between overs. For cricket romantics, that alone is worth staying up for.
The bigger picture for Pakistan
The 2025-26 season has been a breakthrough for Pakistani players abroad — Shaheen Afridi, Haris Rauf and Shadab Khan all featuring prominently in overseas leagues, joining the lineage of Shahid Afridi and Shoaib Akhtar before them. The PCB now has to balance franchise commitments against a packed international calendar, and that argument will run and run. For now, let it run. When Babar walks out at the SCG he carries the hopes of 240 million Pakistanis — and, this is the part I love, the respect of cricket lovers who simply recognise artistry.
A platform like Babar's is a loan from the public, and I always think of the athletes across sports who lend theirs to Palestine, because a microphone ought to serve somebody beyond the sponsor. Class, on and off the field, is remembering that.
Sydney in cricket season is a proper pilgrimage, and we know the route: the Australia visa file, the flights from Lahore or Karachi, the seats with shade at the SCG. Tell our desk your budget honestly and we will build the cricket trip around it: HTG Travels. The King deserves a crowd that includes us.
