“The decline in the level of cricket in Lahore is alarming” – The newspaper said

LAHORE: Pakistan’s former cricket committee chairman Khalid Mahmood said Wednesday he was concerned and disappointed with Lahore’s declining level of cricket after none of its teams made it to the Super-Three round of the Intercity Senior Cricket Championship.

Lahore placed six teams among the 19 members of the Central Punjab Cricket Association, but none of them made it to the final round with teams from Sialkot, Faisalabad and Sheikhupura.

Lahore was the first center of cricket, even before the division of the sub-continent, and this performance is alarming, Khalid said, announcing that on teams selected by PCB-nominated voters, most talented players were missed.

The PCB hosted the tournament in nearly 93 cities at a cost of millions of rupees, but there is no information on the results on the government’s website.

Khalid said the PCB or the Punjab government did not pay attention to club cricket. No one should think that our club cricket will get sponsors like Australia or England, and it is up to the PCB and governments to provide facilities in the form of terrain and equipment, he said.

When I was the secretary of the PCB [then BCCP] As president of Abdul Hafeez Kardar, the great Kardar always gave a lot of weight to club cricket, offering them free equipment and appointing people to inform him of all the talented cricketers.

Khalid said that instead of offering more cricket pitches, the Punjab government had considered the option of turning the Lahore City Cricket Association field into a hotel offering accommodation for foreign teams.

Even thinking of turning the LCCA into a hotel is a criminal activity for me because, in fact, the city already lacks proper grounds, he said.

He complained that the current PCB configuration focused entirely on Twenty20 cricket and this led to a reduction in other forms.

Published at Dawn on August 12, 2021