LAHORE – The PCB's Development Committee, headed by Rameez Raja has taken a most welcome initiative to organise the first-ever cricket tournament for schools. To be simultaneously played at five major centres in the country – Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi and Quetta – the event, lasting a fortnight, would commence on July 10.

The good thing about this enterprise is that not only does it involve 16 teams at each of the five centres, which means as many as 80 schools taking part, the event is also sponsored by Instaphone, and would thus have the nomenclature, Instaphone Inter-School Cricket Tournament. The availability of the sponsor, footing the entire bill of Rs 1.6 million, means that for the first time, modest as they are, incentives both in terms of equipment and cash would be available in school cricket.

Rameez Raja, the head of the newly formed Development Committee, along with Director PCB Brig Munawar Rana, dilated upon the details of the event, and the whole concept. Also present on the occasion were Instaphone's country manager Manan Shabbir, PCB's Marketing Consultant Zahid Bashir, responsible for roping in the sponsors, and General Manager Cricket Operations, Zakir Khan.

This is an effort to kick-start cricket right at the grassroots level, said Raja. "This is for the first time that the Board had taken the lead in interacting with schools. And it is just the beginning. We intend to follow up on this by getting the DPEs of various schools getting trained as coaches in the PCB academy so that they could in turn use this input to remove the chinks at that impressionable age when such correction is most valuable and has a lasting impact", said Raja. Here, he specifically quoted the Indian example, by mentioning that most of their world class batsmen, including such legends as Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar, were all imbued with the basic techniques at the school level. "That is when they are introduced to international cricket, they are a good year or two ahead of those that we throw at the deep end. It is only because of their solid grounding".

Thanking the sponsors, Raja said that he was grateful for their support, especially since it is a lower-end exercise, and yield in terms of mileage is not likely to be very high. This sentiment echoed in the statement of Manan Shabbir when he said that Instaphone would involve itself into all such areas where it could contribute in terms of community service instead of looking at the yield of the sum involved. "It didn't take us more than half a minute to decide in favour of the proposal," said he, assuring the Board that their corporate support would be available for other such ventures as well.

Raja also mentioned this not being an exercise in isolation, for it would be integrated with the soon-to-be-launched Pepsi Clinics, with those hitting the spotlight invited to attend the coaching camps.

Brig Munawar hoped that a network of schools where sports and cricket culture was strong would become more active because of this event, which would be an annual feature, with other schools vying to emulate them. For the moment only those schools have been included, in consultation with the regional associations in the cities involved, where either the tradition of the game was strong or which had infrastructure facilities.

"Grooming cricketers in educational institutions has an added incentive because if they take to cricket, we would have a larger pool of better educated players, which would in due course surely have an enhancing impact on the national team. It would also mean we would down the line have cricketers who being educated would be able to serve the game after their playing days are over", said he.

Details of the event are: 16 teams are distributed in four pools in each of the five cities; the matches are to be contested on league basis, with four apiece being played in a day at various venues. Including the semi-final and the final, which is scheduled for July 24, in all 27 games will be played at each centre.

The prizes up for grabs are: winner, trophy plus Rs 10,000; runner-up trophy and Rs 5,000. In addition to this, Man of the Match, best batsman, bowler, wicket-keeper and fielder would get a commemorative trophy and a prize money of Rs.1,000 apiece.

The organisers are: Karachi, Prof S Siraj-ul-Islam Bokhari; Quetta, Yawar Aziz; Lahore, Khawaja Muhammad Zafar; Rawalpindi, Ashraf Qureshi; Peshawar, Mr. Fazle Habib.

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