Rationale:
The National Club cricket Championship is a national event in which all 2,849 clubs in Pakistan shall showcase their skills every year. The initiation of this national event stems from our programming and management capability to generate an essential cricketing activity for aproximately 44,500 club cricket players across the country. NO other cricketing activity in Pakistan can have such great outreach and dovetail into the existing system for verifibale and predicable results within six months! At present, all our cricketing activity/reach revolves around approximately 6,000 players of all age groups, with a very low refresh rate.
Selection needs to be performance/merit based. If no organized club tournaments take place across Pakistan, how can we proceed with selection of players for inter-district tournaments and other upstream national tournaments? How can we expect to select players based on performance when no such tool exists for players to showcase their talent?
It is for this reason that we have kept investing in existing players without tapping into the enormous resources that are available on tap. Club cricket is the backbone of all cricket activities in Pakistan. Due to lack of PCB involvement in organizing cricket in clubs, selection in inter-district tournaments and other tournaments become an non-performance based exercise, since no performance data is available for these new players.
Program overview:
2,849 Club teams will participate in 97 districts across Pakistan. Hence at the end of the tournament there would be 97 district champions and thus 16 regional champions. 2 pools comprising of 8 teams each will be formed and a national champion will be emerged after the final which will be televised live on TV.
Expected benefits:
- The top performers in this tournament will be dovetailed into our existing inter-district (currently the only feedstock system)
- District/Regional (inter district tournament) selection process will be based on performance. No performance benchmark currently exists for selection of new players.
- Immediate transparency in selection.
- Rapid, statistically verifiable results (in less than 6 months).
- Emerging cricketers will be motivated to improve their skills and fitness standards.
- Raw talent from far flung areas will also be unearthed within six months.
- This tournament will lead to far better and more transparent district selection via this tournament.
- Enhanced pool of players for the selection of teams at the regional level.
- Direct access to the pool of 45,000 cricketers registered in Clubs across Pakistan. At present, we have approximately 6,000 players on tap nationally. This figure shall rise by over 700 percent in a matter of month at a cost of only a fraction of what we currently spend on district and domestic tournaments.
- A complete and comprehensive database of ALL players will be available on website.
This tournament will, in essence, create a paradigm shift in how PCB conducts all its domestic cricket activities.
PROGRAM PYRAMID
Total number of Matches= 5126
Number of players = Approximately 44,500
Aizad Sayid
Director Game Development.
