Some records summarise a career. The Jahangir Khan 555 wins summarise an era, the five and a half years in the 1980s when a squash player from Pakistan simply did not lose. In our Pakistan Facts series, Jahangir Khan Won 555 Squash Matches in a Row, we told the full story of that streak. This follow-up asks the question that story left behind: what does the record mean to the young Pakistanis now chasing it, a generation led by Noor Zaman and fresh from winning the Asian team title in Islamabad on 7 November 2026?
The Streak, in Brief
The bare outline is quickly told. From April 1981 to November 1986, Jahangir Khan won every match he played. Along the way he collected six World Open titles in his career and ten British Open titles in a row, from 1982 to 1991, a run of dominance no player in any racket sport has matched. The full account, with the season-by-season detail, is in the Facts piece linked above, and this article deliberately does not retell it.
One honesty note belongs here, because records should be printed straight. Guinness World Records lists the streak at 555 consecutive wins, and 555 is the figure the whole sport uses. But no complete official count of every match was kept in the early 1980s, when Jahangir was playing tournament, league and exhibition squash across several countries, so the number rests on the Guinness listing rather than on a match-by-match audit anyone can check. What is not in doubt is the shape of the achievement: unbeaten for five and a half years, until Ross Norman of New Zealand beat him in the World Open final of 1986.
Jahangir Khan, photographed at an event in Karachi, remains the standard every Pakistani squash player is measured against.
Photo: Faizan Munawar Varya via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Why Jahangir Khan 555 wins still stands alone
In the four decades since, nobody has come close to a streak of that length. The professional game Jahangir left behind is deeper, faster and more international than the one he ruled, and its leading players now lose matches every season to opponents ranked far below them. The Jahangir Khan 555 wins therefore measure two things at once: the greatness of the man himself, and the size of the gap Pakistan squash has spent a generation trying to close.
When the streak ended, the dominance did not end with it. Jahangir passed the crown to Jansher Khan, and between them the two Khans won 14 World Open titles and ruled the sport into the 1990s. But when Jansher retired in 1998, the line broke. As Dawn noted in its portrait of the new generation, Pakistan has not produced a men’s world champion since, and a sport the country once owned became a memory retold by grandfathers.
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The Grandson Carrying the Chase
The player who has done most to close the gap is Noor Zaman, and the chase runs in his blood. Born in Peshawar in 2004, he is the grandson of Qamar Zaman, the British Open champion of 1975 and one of the men who built Pakistan’s squash dynasty. In April 2025, aged 21, Noor won the inaugural World Under-23 Championship at the DHA Creek Club in Karachi, and he did it the hard way. Trailing Egypt’s Kareem El Torkey by two games in the final, he fought back to win 3-2, taking the last three games 11-8, 11-5 and 11-6, as Dawn’s report of the final recorded. Among the legends watching from the gallery that day was Jahangir Khan himself.
The honours have kept coming. Noor received the President’s Pride of Performance, the third generation of his family to be given it. The Karachi title also carried automatic qualification for the PSA World Championships, the senior stage on which any real chase will have to be run. His rise did not begin in Karachi either: he had already taken a team silver medal at the Hangzhou Asian Games, and in December 2025 he won the men’s individual gold at Pakistan’s National Games in Karachi, beating Huzaifa Ibrahim 3-1 in the final. At the Asian Games in Nagoya in 2026 he carried Pakistan’s flag at the opening ceremony, as Dawn reported, and he helped the team to a silver medal while taking a bronze in the singles himself. This site’s own report, Pakistan Squash Team Wins Asian Games Silver in Nagoya, recorded how close that team came to gold. He trains at the Mushaf Squash Complex in Islamabad, and by September 2026 he had climbed to 29th in the world rankings.
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A Team Title on Home Soil
On 7 November 2026, Pakistan beat South Korea 2-0 in Islamabad to win the Asian Team Championship for the 16th time, and the first time since 2016, as we reported in Pakistan Beat South Korea 2-0 to Win the Asian Team Squash Championship. Noor Zaman was at the heart of that team, and in the stands at the Mushaf Squash Complex sat his grandfather Qamar Zaman, watching a Zaman lift a continental crown in the same city where the family name was made. Around Noor, the revival has other names too: Hamza Khan won the World Junior Championship in Melbourne in 2023, the first Pakistani to take that title since Jansher Khan in 1986, as The News described in its account of Pakistan’s squash revival.
The Standard, Not Just the Number
Nobody inside Pakistan squash pretends that 555 is a realistic target for one player in the modern game. The tour is too deep, the calendar too crowded and the leading pack too evenly matched. What the record gives the new generation is a standard rather than a target: proof that Pakistan once set the terms of this sport for a decade, and a height to measure progress against. Jahangir himself now watches from the other side of the glass. Our featured photograph shows him at the prize ceremony of the 2023-24 PSA World Tour Finals, standing between the current champions, Egypt’s Nouran Gohar and Ali Farag, the players who now hold the titles he once collected as a matter of routine.
The streak may never be matched, and it does not need to be. What matters is that, after a generation in the wilderness, Pakistan’s young players are again winning world titles at their age groups, team golds at home and places among the world’s top 30, and doing it in the shadow of the greatest record the sport has known. The Jahangir Khan 555 wins are safe for now. The chase, not the number, is the good news.
Sources
- Good News Pakistan (Pakistan Facts): Jahangir Khan Won 555 Squash Matches in a Row
- Dawn: Noor clinches world squash title with thrilling comeback
- The Nation: Pakistan’s Noor Zaman crowned U-23 squash world champion
- Dawn: Noor Zaman carries Pakistan flag and squash’s lost glory into Asian Games
- The News: Reclaiming the throne, Pakistan’s squash revival
- Featured photo: Nettrom via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Body photo: Faizan Munawar Varya via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.