LAHORE: Pakistan’s next generation of cricketers began work this week under a national development programme run out of the Pakistan Cricket Board’s Lahore headquarters. The Regional Under-19 Academies Programme, launched on Monday, is designed to sharpen the skills of young cricketers across the country before they enter the domestic age-group calendar.
According to details of the programme, a total of 20 Under-19 academies have been established across 16 regions. The 20 teams will take part in training sessions at their respective regional headquarters rather than being pulled into a single central camp, and each squad will consist of 25 Under-19 players — putting roughly 500 young cricketers into structured training at the same time.
The academies are not limited to net sessions. Players will be briefed on the off-field demands of professional cricket alongside their on-field work — the fitness monitoring, media obligations, contractual understanding and discipline that separate a talented teenager from a functioning professional. Training will be conducted under the supervision of the Pakistan Cricket Board’s regional coaches.
Training players at 16 regional headquarters instead of one national camp is a deliberate structural choice. A teenager from a smaller centre no longer has to fund travel and accommodation in another city to be seen, and regional coaches — who watch the same players across a full season rather than a fortnight — carry the assessment. It also multiplies the number of cricketers in supervised training at any one time, which is the point of putting 25 players in each of 20 squads rather than picking a single elite group of 30.
The programme feeds directly into the domestic age-group season. Players will prepare for the National Under-19 Cup and Championship, and will also test themselves in white-ball one-day and red-ball three-day tournaments — a deliberate attempt to build cricketers who can handle both formats rather than specialists produced by a single competition.
For Lahore, the significance is twofold. The programme is administered from the PCB’s headquarters at Gaddafi Stadium, the building where the national selection and development machinery sits, and the city’s own regional set-up feeds into the same 16-region structure. Lahore has historically supplied a disproportionate share of Pakistan’s international cricketers, and a regionally distributed academy model is intended to keep that pipeline flowing while broadening it well beyond the traditional centres.
The academies launch in a week of considerable churn at senior level: Pakistan’s Test squad for the Lord’s Test was overhauled with seven players dropped and seven new faces brought in. That turnover is a reminder of why a functioning under-19 structure matters — every place opened at the top eventually has to be filled from below.
The first measure of the programme will be the National Under-19 Cup, where the 20 academy squads will show whether concentrated regional coaching produces better cricketers than the ad-hoc trial system it replaces. The answer, as usual, will be scrutinised most closely in Lahore.
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