Nida dar biography

A fan of cricketer Shahid Afridi and Bollywood actor Salman Khan, Nida Dar imbibes the qualities of both - in her cricket as well as personality. Hailing from the industrial town of Gujranwa...
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A fan of cricketer Shahid Afridi and Bollywood actor Salman Khan, Nida Dar imbibes the qualities of both - in her cricket as well as personality. Hailing from the industrial town of Gujranwala, as a hard-hitting middle order bat and an offspinner, she is arguably Pakistan’s finest T20 cricketer and became the first player from the country to be offered a WBBL contract in 2019.

For the longest time, her performances were erratic. At her peak, she was Pakistan’s best player in both their Asian Games gold medal campaigns - 2010 and 2014. When returns weren’t in her favour, she was dropped from the side for the 2017 world cup. It was a low that was to transform her cricket.

A disciplined work towards fitness and more maturity in batting made her one of the most reliable players in the team since then. Having started out as a pacer who had to shift to offpin due to a stress fracture, she added more guile and smarts to her bowling over the years.

Off the field, she is popular for her whacky haircuts, pranks and Punjabi jokes.

Nida Dar, born in January 1987 in Gujranwala, grew up in a cricketing household. Rashid Hassan, her father, played eight first-class matches. Eleven members of her extended family were part of a cricket club. No surprise then that she aspired to play for her country, except that Pakistan didn't have a national women's team at the time.

She played nevertheless, and it was while she was captaining at the collegiate level - for the Higher Education Commission against a Karachi team that had international players - that she found out Pakistan did indeed have a women's team, which had played its first game in 1997.

Dar still had to persuade her family to allow her to play cricket seriously, but found support from her father and trialled for and subsequently became part of the Pakistan team. She made her international debut in the 2010 T20 World Cup against Sri Lanka in the West Indies, and her ODI debut a few months later.

Her all-round abilities came to the fore in the Asian Games, where she helped Pakistan clinch gold medals in 2010 and 2014.

A constant in the Pakistan team since, Dar is the most capped T20I player for Pakistan and was the first Pakistan player, male or female, to take 100 T20I wickets. She is among the first four players to play 100 women's ODIs fo

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