In rural South Punjab, a school that uses sport to inspire young women

SAM MORSHEAD IN MULTAN: Here, the girls are taught the importance of independent thought, the freedom of self-determination, and the thrill of a simple endorphin rush; three pretty basic parts of life for you and I, previously inaccessible to so many

• Multan's message to the world on seismic PSL debut night

When the PSL is in town, it’s easy to get swept up in its wake.

It is the biggest show around - a heart-pumping, crowd-thumping spectacular that demands the attention of a nation, and many more besides.

Yet cricket’s reach in Pakistan spreads way beyond one competition. This is a land of 200million people, the majority of whom are besotted by our game; and on Thursday, as the PSL roadshow rested, The Cricketer got a first-hand glimpse of cricket’s persuasive, pervasive influence in this enchanting country.

Fifteen kilometres off the Sukkur-Multan motorway, past rows of mango trees and through acres of green and yellow crops, lies the Amina Girls’ School, the flagship of 86 academic centres taken on from the government by the non-profit Tareen Education Foundation over recent years.

It is inconspicuous from the outside - a brick-red double-gate sitting besides a single, unobtrusive sign. But it is what is going on behind the walls that matters.

Here, there is a very real effort to instigate social change, using sport - and cricket in particular - as a catalyst.

Historically, girls and young women in these rural areas of Pakistan shoulder much of the blue-collar agricultural labour. Many of the students at Amina are the daughters of cotton pickers, some are the daughters of drivers, all are low-paid. 

^{Students at the Amina School pad up}

In the past, they would follow an inevitable path into the work of their mothers, any flickers of inspiration or ambition trodden into the dusty floor of underwhelming classrooms, scrubbed out by society’s expectations of what they ought to become.

In this particular Pakistani enclave, however, the future looks somewhat different. 

Here, the girls are taught the importance of independent thought, the freedom of self-determination, and the thrill of a simple endorphin rush; three pretty basic parts of life for you and I, previously inaccessible to so many young people out in the fields of South Punjab.

During a two-hour visit to the school, The Cricketer saw this process in action, and it was a life-affirming privilege. 

Upon arrival, a taekwondo demonstration. 

Bushra, a feisty and bespectacled teenager with a sense of humour to match her downright cockiness, smashed her forearm through 10 very sturdy tiles, and immediately we had a metaphor for the trip.

Through the power of sport, Amina is encouraging individuality, personality, creativity and strength among its students, energising young women to become the people they want to be.

Exhibitions from the school’s rollerblading and chess clubs, and a game of one-tip cricket (a sort of French/corridor hybrid, for those back home) followed, around a visit to the solitary outdoor pitch - a concrete net strip without an astroturf topping, on a dirt outfield. 

These are modest facilities, but that is not the point; they are facilities, and they are giving a dozen young human beings the chances they would never previously have had.

Hira, the cricket team’s captain, pulls powerfully off the back foot and bowls with a fabulously upright seam. She slaps this part-time off-spinner through forward square leg for four on several occasions, and gets one to somehow nibble off the wicket and catch my outside edge. If only she had thought about installing a first slip. The Cricketer sighs cavernously and quietly thanks the impact of T20.

Rameen, a 17-year-old medium pacer bowling in a turquoise headscarf, approaches her delivery stride with the rhythm of a seasoned percussionist and flows gracefully through her action.

Don't mess with the girls of Lodhran pic.twitter.com/ri407SuDIZ

— Sam Morshead (@SamMorshead_) February 27, 2020

These kids have talent. Talent which, in previous generations, might have laid criminally dormant - and all for the sake of convention. 

“When we first got to the schools, and we went to the girls and offered them the chance to play cricket, or other sports, they didn’t want to,” Ali Tareen, the Multan Sultans co-owner, says.

“They were worried they would be seen by the boys, and that the boys would tell on them, and they would get in trouble.

“The next time, we put tents up all around, so no one else could see them. And only the teachers were there when they arrived.

“Straight away they were laughing and playing, and wanting to get involved. That’s where it started, and now they have the confidence they need to go on and be who they want to be.”

There is a slight inconsistency in Tareen’s twin projects of the Amina School and the Sultans, given the very public remarks made by his high-profile player Shahid Afridi about his own children’s sporting opportunities.

Afridi, a self-proclaimed “conservative Pakistani father”, wrote in his autobiography that he would not allow his four daughters to play sport outside “for social and religious reasons”.

“They have my permission to play any sport as long as they're indoors,” Afridi wrote. “Cricket? No, not for my girls.

“They have permission to play all the indoor games they want but my daughters are not going to be competing in public sporting activities.

“I've made this decision and their mother agrees with me.”

The Cricketer asks Tareen how he reconciles Afridi’s comments with the female empowerment his charities are trying so hard to create in Pakistani culture.

“His girls are very cool and sporty,” he says. “He said he doesn’t want them to make a career out of it.”

The Tareen family, who operate a farm of some 2,000 acres around Amina, have felt the ‘negative’ effect of more and more young women choosing to further their studies rather than work in their fields. As the local labour force has contracted, so the Tareens have had to bring in alternative recruits from further afield. Staffing costs for that part of the business have quadrupled. 

^{The school has 1,000 members}

Not that Ali, nor his father Jahangir, are particularly bothered.

“One day, we came to the school, and there was a class sat down outside. They were refusing to move,” Tareen junior said.

“They told us ‘we will not go until you have made a college for us’. They wanted to stay and learn more.

“We listened to them. We had to listen to them. And now you have one girl who was at the old school when it was just one building, was part of the class which sat outside and refused to move, has gone on to university to study maths, and is teaching there today. She’s also a PCB-certified coach.

“That is incredible, and that’s the chance we want to give these girls.”

As we leave, the students ask for selfies, and the teachers wholeheartedly thank us for coming. 

Bushra wants me to sign her taekwondo belt, Hira her cricket cap. I feel ridiculous; a scratchy club cricketer scribbling my autograph in fountain pen on the martial arts uniform of a Punjabi child I’ve only just met. 

She, her teachers and her school are the stars, not me.