Imran Yusuf picks his best Twenty20 team from Pakistan's cricket history. Pakistan will soon resume Test cricket action. But before we furrow our brows and put on serious voices and go back to admiring forward defensives, I thought I'd prolong the last few dizzy moments of our T20 World Cup hangover with something rather fun and speculative. Below is my all-time T20 Pakistan team – specifying the years in which players’ performances were best suited for T20 glory – followed by a pre-emptive defence of my selection. Indulge your inner cricket geek and send in your team changes.

1. Saeed Anwar 1997 2. Hanif Mohammad 1958 (wk) 3. Zaheer Abbas 1976 4. Javed Miandad 1986 (vc) 5. Inzamam-ul-Haq 2005 6. Shahid Afridi 2009 7. Imran Khan 1983 (c) 8. Wasim Akram 1996 9. Fazal Mahmood 1954 10. Saqlain Mushtaq 1999 11. Umar Gul 2009

Rest of15-man squad: Waqar Younis 1994 Majid Khan 1977 Abdul Qadir 1987 Abdul Razzaq 2000

Openers and wicket-keeper I doubt my pick of Saeed Anwar will raise any eyebrows, but I fear some will question the inclusion of the 'Little Master'. To those who think he was too slow and could never have played T20, I point to one incident when Pakistan toured England in 1954. After a few matches in which Hanif, adhering to his prescribed role in the team of cautious guardsman, played a few defensive innings, the press were quick to term him a 'stone-waller'. Hanif was so riled by this that he went out in his next innings and blasted a lightning-quick 87, with 17 fours and a six.

A man who can bat over 16 hours to save a Test against the West Indies in the West Indies can, quite certainly, do anything with a cricket bat - and in any format. Indeed, we might extend this praise to cricket balls: in England, he once bowled three balls of an over with his right arm, the other three with his left. If T20 is about innovation and improvisation allied to solid technique, Hanif Mohammad should be the first name on the team-sheet.

His more-than-capable wicket-keeping is an additional reason to have him in the team. Wasim Bari and Moin Khan came close to making my line-up, but neither would edge out anyone else in the final eleven, so I've given the gloves to Hanif.

Middle order Zaheer, Miandad and Inzy pick themselves. The only question is over their most suitable year. For Zaheer Abbas, I've gone with 1976, in which he scored an inhuman 2,544 runs in one season for Gloucestershire. Which year to choose from Javed Miandad's long, brilliant career? In the end I settled for 1986, the year he hit the 'shot of the century' in Sharjah. That tournament-winning innings was precisely the kind of attacking yet measured knock a number 4 or 5 needs to play in a T20 match.

Were Miandad to get out, the mature, experienced, paternal Inzamam-ul-Haq from 2005, chasing down targets in an almost Zen-like state, would surely do the needful. I was tempted to opt for the young, blasting Inzy who burst onto the scene in the 1992 World Cup, but there's enough fire-power at the top of the order and from the lower order in this team.

All-rounders Shahid Afridi won the player of the tournament award in the first T20 World Cup and should have won it in the second (the sympathy vote to Tillakaratne Dilshan was such a glaring case of daylight robbery that even a friend of mine who lives in a crime-ridden part of Karachi said he'd never seen anything like it). Sometimes all it takes is an innings, but Afridi provided two. His 50s in the semi-final and final of the 2009 World Cup made us all forget and forgive the last decade of disappointment. His varied leg-spin, so ideally suited to T20 cricket, has the unfortunate by-product of keeping Abdul Qadir out of the side.

For Imran Khan, I've prioritised the bowling. Following the 1982/83 series against India,  and before a shin injury cut him down in his prime and stopped him bowling properly for two years, Imran was probably the best bowler the world has seen in the modern era. His official ICC rating of 922 points on January 30, 1983, is the third highest of all time. With his attacking batting, his quick-thinking captaincy, and his calculated, targeted bowling, there is no doubt Imran would have made an outstanding T20 cricketer.

With Wasim Akram, it was again just a case of which year to choose. I was torn between the youthful zest of his early years, culminating with those two balls in 1992, and the tail-end of his career when, off an extremely short run-up, he used all his guile and mastery to bamboozle batsmen all over the world. In the end I settled for the happy medium and chose 1996. He's also an ideal number 8 batsman in this format, just the sort of big-hitter you'd want to come in with five to ten balls of the innings left.

Bowlers Yes, it is not a typo or technical flaw: Waqar Younis really isn't in my team. I realise this invites accusations of stupidity, insanity and perhaps even blasphemy. I also realise some of my friends will think I'm just trying to get my first death threat as a writer and consequently go about thinking I’m edgy and cool. You must believe me: I'd really, genuinely much rather have Umar Gul. Hear me out.

One imagines that Fazal Mahmood with his lateral movement of the ball - by all accounts, largely unplayable - and Imran Khan would open the bowling, perhaps with Wasim getting in an over or two before the spinners come on. With these three, all angles are covered: pace and bounce, swing and seam, accuracy and rawness, right-arm and left-arm.

The fourth fast-bowler would only be required to bowl at the death: Umar Gul has proved himself beyond reproach in this regard. He has not failed, not once. Ask him to bowl six yorkers in a row and he can do it. He could probably do it blind-folded. Waqar was superb with a new ball and even more lethal with a reversing ball. He was also a brilliant death bowler. However, a black, black mark hangs over his head. It is as black as the Bangalore skies through which a white ball repeatedly sailed high, high into the stands of the Chinnaswamy Stadium in 1996. Who can forget Ajay Jadeja and those 40 runs in two overs in the World Cup Quarter Final? Until Gul has his Jadeja moment, until he fails us once, he takes his place among this awesome pace quartet.

Finally, Saqlain just edges out Qadir and Mushtaq Ahmed for the specialist spinner's slot. The quickest man to 100 ODI wickets had intelligence and variation, took wickets regularly, and could even be called upon to bowl at the death.