Lahore's Vanishing Cricket Nursery: The Grounds Pakistan Is Losing — and the Next Inzamam With Them

I stood in Lahore's Minto Park on a gloomy afternoon last March. This ground was once the city's biggest cricket nursery — a dozen club nets, the crack of bat on ball from dawn to dusk. That afternoon it was nearly empty. A pile of sand by Gate Two, and beside it, on a paved traffic island, small boys playing tape-ball cricket. I asked: no nets nearby? A teenager shrugged. "There were. Now it's flats."

Those two words hold Pakistan cricket's biggest unspoken crisis. I have watched this game for 33 years, and since 2026 I have run a contrarian podcast from Madrid where every episode forces me to make at least one falsifiable prediction — right or wrong, I write it down. Today's prediction is not about football. It is about Lahore's disappearing grounds. Because when I look at it through venue, the way this city's talent-production circuitry is vanishing tells me more about Pakistan's next two decades than any trophy cabinet can.

For two decades the consensus has been that Pakistan lacks nothing but management and opportunity. Lahore's club circuit — Minto Park, Baba Ground, Chauburji, Garhi Shahu, Dharampura — is sacred ground. Inzamam-ul-Haq, Taufeeq Umar, Nasir Jamshed, Ahmed Shehzad all came up from this soil. Minto Park was called the city's biggest cricket nursery; under former PCB chairman Tauqir Zia, roughly two dozen extra nets were installed there. Former ICC Test umpire Mian Aslam, president of Muslim Club, says seven captains emerged from this ground.

But the question is no longer who. The question is: is the ground still there? Ali Iqbal, president of Township Gymkhana, says the city's fields are shrinking, and some have been swallowed whole by housing societies. Residents say that without safe grounds, boys now play in the streets — a danger to themselves. P&T Gymkhana's Azhar Zaidi adds another layer: these clubs, within their thin resources, try to give children from families who cannot afford expensive academy fees a way in.

This is where my football life helps, because I have watched academies like La Masia and Vallecana year after year. One thing I know: talent is cultivated against a map of distance and cost. If a child has no free place to play within walking distance, the talent may exist but the route out never opens. Minto Park's value is not its net count but its network effect — coaches, peers and scouts concentrated in one place, which you cannot easily recreate by building separate new grounds.

I will not drag in football metrics here — xG or PPDA cannot measure the loss of a field, and forcing them on would mean fabricating data. But one calculation transfers, one I have seen repeatedly in academy economics: free grounds are a subsidy to talent. Remove the subsidy and the cost shifts onto families. The boy who once played for free must now pay a private academy fee — or quit. The same city may not produce fewer talents, but the socio-economic filter deciding which ones survive grows far narrower.

It runs deeper. As cities densify and land values rise, cricket grounds lose the contest with housing societies — because a ground shows no visible economic return. Minto Park is no exception. The PCB installed nets once, but that was one man's initiative, not institutional policy. Today no binding mechanism prevents a ground from becoming housing. Responsibility is diffuse — PCB, municipal authorities, private developers — with no single accountable body.

That gap is the real danger, because the loss is irreversible. Once land becomes flats, the ground rarely returns. And the damage arrives with a lag — lose the field today and the talent deficit surfaces six or seven years later, when that generation knocks on the national team's door.

Someone may ask whether I am exaggerating. Pakistan has always mined talent from the streets; Mumbai in the Sachin era, cricket-mad Karachi, Lahore's alleys — games happen without grounds. True, and I concede talent never fully dies; it finds new routes. Maybe boys will rise from parking lots, alleys and rooftops — Inzamam himself was a product of off-field cricket. But here I should state the limit of my argument clearly: losing free grounds may not cut the number of talents so much as their quality and diversity — because those raised in alleys retain only the most stubborn few; the ones who need coaching, regular matches and peer competition fall away. So the condition of my prediction is this: if Lahore's remaining grounds are not protected, over the next decade the number of age-group cricketers emerging from the city may not fall, but the share of them who are properly coached and technically formed will drop clearly. I am writing that down and keeping the receipt.

I made a bet nobody wanted to take — that the talent line starts from the field, not the trophy. The empty Minto Park taught me that when the crowd leaves, the game finally starts telling the truth. Lahore's question is no longer who succeeds Inzamam — it is whether the ground for that successor will still exist. Watch Minto Park, Baba Ground and Dharampura over the next five years; which grounds survive and which become flats will tell you where Pakistan cricket will find its next nursery — or whether it will have to look at all.