NOW that the colours of the Pakistan Super League have spread all over the country and the event has become a huge success, I want to draw the attention of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) and PSL franchise owners towards the need for expanding their operations in rural Sindh as well.

If someone roams around the streets and villages of Sindh, he will notice that the game runs in the blood of the people as it does for the inhabitants of other areas of the country.

However, as a quick glance at the history of cricket in Pakistan shows, there have been hardly any matches in which anyone from rural Sindh has represented Pakistan in the national team. Some people counter this resentment by asserting that talent and excellence must be preferred to anything else. My argument is that there is considerable neglect on the part of the authorities in charge, including the Sindh government, which has resulted in such a situation.

The infrastructure in the region is extremely poor. In addition to other cricketing facilities, like arranging training camps and talent hunt drives, even the stadiums in the province are like peanuts for an extraordinary number of lovers of this game to practice their passion.

Where there are stadiums in cities like Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas and Larkana, those are pathetically managed.

Meanwhile, if required facilities are provided, it will not only yield a better pool of cricketers who can raise the level of competition and standards of the game, it will remove the sense of alienation among the people of Sindh.

While presenting his paper titled ‘Cricket, society and religion: a study of increasing religiosity in the national cricket team of Pakistan’ Dr Ali Khan, a well-known social anthropologist and instructor at the Lahore University of Management Science, made a strange statement.

In a response to a question he justified the poor condition of this sport in Sindh by quoting the cricket board and saying that during the phase of development of cricketing infrastructure in the country, the security situation in Sindh was not favourable.

I request PCB, PSL franchises and of course the Sindh government to look into this matter a bit more seriously.

Aizaz Hussain Buledi
Sehwan Sharif

Published in Dawn, February 24th, 2019