I am saddened to the core that we 20 crore nation cant produce few batsman who can play their shots with confidence and hit the ball for boundary. We've raw players like Danish Aziz who still needs a year or two develop confidence and rythm for his shots, coming in to take spots.
There's a class difference between Azam Khan and Danish Aziz, Azam who hit Amir out of park at will, why dont we have players like Azam Khan? Simple Answer is while Danish Aziz have spent most of his time studying, Azam Khan literally grew up in Moin Khan Academy Karachi, had bowlers bowling to him round the clock and coaches guiding him everyday. Does Danish Aziz from lower middle class background have access to these facilities? Forget having access to these facilities at his young age like Azam, not even in Domestic he has facilities like Azam Khan, now that he has come to NHPC he can start developing, how far are we. While we see instagram stories of Azam khan having nets every few hours, Danish Aziz has done masters from Karachi University so he probably has burden of running a family too and he has reached age of 24 25 through all this, how much time he spent in training through all these years? Did he have finance to afford such training and coaching? I am sorry but talent is not sufficient, you can play street tennis ball night tournaments with talent but not at international level, even half a decent athletic kid with proper training and coaching throughout his youth can become a good batsman(not talking about bowling b/c it requires physique).
What is cure to this? Can we only expect from Moin KHan or Rashid Latif progeny to run our cricket, and should we now wait for their sons to grow up. Apparently upper middle class families who can actually afford consistent training and coaching on their own focus their resources on studies instead of cricket, wheres the passion and love for cricket which keeps us and this nation alive at nights? Cure is simple introduce cricket, proper professional cricket in schools colleges not tennis ball cricket in half hour breaks, even that is finished nowdays. Ok forget the government schools who cannot afford such facilities, it should be must for rich private schools, India's reason for success is school level cricket, everyone knows that. I believe if we can study nights and days like mad to become engineers doctors and MBA sure we can produce some cricketers. PM Imran Khan what is he doing? They should create balance b/w cricket and studies at schools colleges universities, same system is in england, but it appears Private schools Mafia are only interested in books or maybe little bit of parties with girls dancing, thats what we pay thousands for every month, where is the investment in sports?
I have studied in best schools and colleges in Karachi, and forget football hockey, even the cricket which is on tongue of every child is almost completely absent, I mean are most of us youth couch potatoes who drink coke and eat biryani all day, and most we can do is learn few books, or should we just stick to leisure playing of cricket on streets with tennis ball.
Love for cricket made me join private academy for cricket, one of the renowned in Khi, and sad to say it was horrendous, I hardly got two net practice sessions of hardly 10-15 balls every week, that is on top of lack of kids and most were from lower middle class background, Fair to say if I'd have fared better if I had paid personal net bowler to bowl at me with help of youtube videos, I'd have done better, anyways my love for cricket eventually took to other things and I grew up but this is not the point with amount of free time we have as kids in our hands sure with proper system and encouragement you've thousands of kids having net practice, but for encouragement to be there there has to facilities available, and what is best way to motivate kids to play cricket? Ofcourse where they spend half of their days and socialize, that's school. You've middle class upper middleclass lower middle class kids all gathering at school, proper system would do wonders, I am sure the kids would love to play cricket. Carry on this to university level as well. Forget the government public schools who can hardly afford good education for now, I am talking about rich private schools, Imran Khan who has cricketing background from UK should make it a must for these schools to introduce Hard Ball cricket in their infrastructure. I am sure we can develop atleast enough batsmen to fill our middle order.
That's how it works everywhere in world, unfortunate for our country, youth in USA UK NZ Australia actively participate in sports almost all kids even uptill university level. They produce thousands of football players every year, unfortunate for us forget football we do not have proper infrastructure for cricket, all we do is fill our bags with books and listen to teachers rant through day, even then we're unable to produce any world class engineers or scientists or doctors and are far behind in technology.
