KARACHI: There was lots of anticipated excitement at the Kokan Family Park in Bahadurabad just before the commencement of the three-day Women’s Ramazan Night Cricket Tournament here on Thursday.

There were hoardings and boards to be put up, there were the players reporting to be handed their different coloured kits and the families of the players taking their place around the boundary as they got geared up to cheer for their girls and the teams they were playing for.

“There are eight teams playing this year,” Hadeel Obaid, founder and CEO of KheloKricket, told Dawn, as she went on to talk about those teams, namely, Smashers, Warriors, Boom Boom, AKYSB Blue, Fighters, Athletes, etc.

“We will have 12 teams next year because too many girls registered this time and we didn’t have enough teams for them. But we will be able to expand for them by next year,” she said.

KheloKricket has been hosting women’s night cricket tournaments for four years and this year they are doing it in partnership with the Pakistan Super League (PSL) franchise team Multan Sultans. They have also recently signed an investment deal with sports promotion agency Magnus Sports that will help them promote grass-roots level cricket across Punjab and other parts of Pakistan.

“Multan Sultans,” Hadeel said, “is also pushing for women’s cricket in the PSL as KheloKricket continues with our endeavour of working for women’s cricket at the grass-roots. This is a neglected segment of cricket that requires a boost in every possible capacity and we would like to encourage and develop cricket in this arena.”

The Women’s Ramazan Night Cricket Tournament kicks off KheloKricket and Multan Sultan’s first of four tournaments charted for 2019. The next one will be played in Islamabad in September followed by one in Lahore in November to wrap up the year in Multan in December.

Ali Tareen of Multan Sultans said that next year they would also be organising tournaments for women in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa along with venturing into more cities of Sindh and south of Punjab. “We want to provide a platform to all women who want to play cricket in the country and develop more talent as they receive professional coaching in hard-ball cricket,” he said.

The park’s floodlights came on exactly at 10pm. The players started preparing for the first match as the ones who didn’t have a match on the first day chilled.

Huraina Sajjad, who opens for the Athletes and who also plays for the Pakistan A women’s team, was there with her father Sajjad Hussain. Tooba Khan, a fast bowler for Fighters and who prides herself for her painful toe-smashing Yorkers, said that she along with her brother Zeeshan Khan were going to cheer for the Smashers team. “Because I also don’t have a match on the initial day and many of her friends are playing for the Smashers,” she said. With her was her friend left-arm fast bowler Zareen Khan who also had similar intentions. Another player Inshara Asad who was also there with her brother Fardeen Khan, a Customs Academy player, thought they would just cheer for the best players and a good game.

Meanwhile, leg spinner Areeb Shah, who had just received her new yellow kit was getting ready and receiving plenty of good luck wishes from behind the boundary.

Another young player Zareen Fatima’s mother Asma Rizvi seemed more excited than her daughter who knew exactly how many runs she was going to score and how many wickets she was going to take as she eyed her opponent team.

The matches kicking off at 10pm go on till 2am or 3am in the friendliest of atmospheres and safest of places. The final matches are to be played on Sunday after a day’s break on Saturday.

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2019