Karachi’s renowned Polo Grounds still fertile territory for Pakistani cricket

Late Sunday morning, and there is not a scrap of spare ground to be found at the Polo Grounds in downtown Karachi. Every last patch of its 20 acres of path and grass is taken up with games of tape-ball cricket, there must be 30, 40, 50 overlapping matches, enough, anyway, that it’s impossible to count the hundreds of players who are scattered all around, the fielders mixing with each so that if the man at mid-wicket in one game turned on the spot he could play cover in another, or fine leg for a third. Outside India, and the maidan in Mumbai, there isn’t a sight in cricket quite like it.

The place is officially known as the Gulshan-e-Jinnah, but no one will be able to give you directions if you call it that. The Polo Grounds, on the other hand, everyone knows. Everyone in Karachi cricket has played here over the years. Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was where Hanif Mohammad and his four brothers learned the game. They’d only just moved to the city after partition. “One could see hundreds of people, mostly youngsters, playing cricket there every day,” Hanif wrote in his autobiography “whoever came first would choose his own spot and pitch his stumps for practice or for a match. Even the maulvis would join in.”

His younger brother, Mushtaq, told Peter Oborne how “when we were still small, my youngest cousin Iqbal and my older cousin Nisar and I would set out every Sunday with just two annas each in our pockets, and we headed to the Polo Ground in the centre of the city where many teams used to be playing matches with intermingled field placings”. He still hasn’t forgiven his older brothers for making him the 12th man. Soon enough, Mushtaq and his brother both graduated to the old Gymkhana ground over next