You can't be more wrong than this ..... SRL has better home grown production than PAK to be honest.
Not really! This is not about Sri Lanka to start with. Then again, just because it may hold true for Sri Lanka as well does not make it false for Pakistan.
You are considering "producing" player and players representing a country as same, which is not.
That is an incorrect assumption on your part. Other than Imran, how many other Pakistani players actually came through the English system? Hardly any. And there too, Imran already had talent to boot, that he refined into better skills through practice. Pakistan always produced players, despite its system and infrastructure, and they honed their skills playing wherever they could. They were already good enough so the counties would ony benefit taking them in - it was a mutual benefit for both parties. Point remains, despite the infrastructure Pakistan produced and has been producing high quality cricketers.
Hanif, Fazal, Kardar & Khan Md. happens to be Pakistani because of partition - Lala Amarnath would have been Pakistani as well had he been Muslim, so would have been Vijay Hazare and ** Bedi as well - had Shikhs decided to join PAK ..... they are the product of British Indian system, not PAK.
And Chinese would have started playing cricket if they were part of India. And Russia too. I am not even talking about the Hanif and Kardar time. I am talking about the next generation of Pakistani cricketers that were well after that time and not carrying any Indian influence. This phenomenon astonishingly remains true to date!
From late 60s to early 00's only handful of world class players are PAK's domestic product - Qadir, Inzi, Anwar, YK, MoYo, Saq & Shoaib. That too because MoYo & YK were extremely lucky to have Bob and may be Asif, Amir had the potential - that's net net 8-9 players in total, may be 12 at most, if I take Afridi, Ajmal & Razzak in the mix partially.
In addition, there are Imran Khan, Sarfraz Nawaz, Javed Miandad, Mudassar Nazar, Salim Malik, Asif Iqbal, Majid Khan, Iqbal Qasim, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Aaqib Javed, Zaheer Abbas, Rashid Latif, Wasim Bari - these all come from Pakistan domestic system however broken it may be, these players rose despite that. And you cannot discredit the ones you named because they had Bob - they were good enough to be honed, you can't coach a pony into a horse.
For SRL, Hari, Sanath, Mahela, Sanga, Dilshan, Vaas, Herath and of course Murali, you could have added Anjelo as well and without their poor stats in early career Mendis, Roy Dias, Atapattu & Arjuna are border line - and none of them played in Country before 28/29, which means their game was already developed in domestics. Spin bowling is a traditional sub-continent art while WK is a different skill - still if I take Latif & Bari, SRL also had Prassanna Jaya, the best gloves-man of 2000s afterward.
Good for them - not talking about SL system here, but as I said my argument could also apply to Sri Lanka.
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Here's the part that you missed from my post: "
relatively speaking, most other countries, especially the full-member nations have always had better infrastructure than Pakistan ..." ...
England, Australia, India, West Indies, New Zealand which would constitute "most other countries" had a better cricket management system and infrastructure than Pakistan through the time. It was better at that time, and it is better now - it does not matter whether or not Pakistan system is better now than it was earlier - relatively speaking almost all countries' infrastructure has evolved to be better than it was 30-40 years ago, to date these countries have it better than Pakistan. The point is, despite this Pakistan has been producing cricketers that have historically been equal to or better than what other nations have produced.
The English counties were only to hone their talent into more refined skills that would be apparent later on. The antiquated Pakistani system still produced that talent, you know their names, and that was exactly my point. No matter the dysfunctional system and poor infrastructure, Pakistan continues to produce cricketers that the cricket world has been marveling at and being appreciative of all this time.
May be due to poor / rough grounds they may not know how to dive to stop or catch a ball at the school/university/club, or perhaps even first class level, but they do know how to swing a tennis ball and a cricket ball very nicely. They know how to bowl quick, they have that legacy. By hook or by crook, they learn how to make the ball talk. They are inventive and resourceful. Nobody taught them to bowl reverse swing, no institute or system, because the "system" did not know there was anything called Reverse Swing, or for that matter the "Doosra". All this despite the system or may be, because of it!! Necessity is the mother of invention! It's complicated, as you can see.
