Late Sunday morning, and there is not a scrap of spare ground to be found at Polo Ground 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 is 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 Oval Maidan in Mumbai, there is not 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. Polo Ground, 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 had 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.”
