Insurgency-wracked Pak province wants crack at cricket glory

The car park attached to a sports complex in Quetta, one of Pakistan's most dangerous cities, is full most afternoons -- but there are no cars parked there.
Instead the lanes criss-crossing the enormous stretch of asphalt are filled with dozens of teenage boys clad in bright colours, playing cricket with tennis balls wrapped in tape and stumps erected at all points of the compass.
The chaos of the battlefield leaves onlookers baffled -- but each of the fielding teenagers knows exactly where his ball is flying and how he needs to catch it.
These boys are devoted to the game in cricket-obsessed Pakistan, whose national team have won both 50-over and Twenty20 World Cups.

The current team, however, stands on the brink of elimination from this year's World T20 facing a crucial match against New Zealand in Mohali on Tuesday night after defeat to arch-rivals and hosts India at the weekend.
There is a glaring hole in their line-up: not one of their 15-man squad is from Balochistan, Pakistan's biggest and most under-developed province, of which Quetta is the capital.

Around 100 metres from the car park, at the western end of the Nawab Akbar Bugti cricket stadium, professional cricketers clad optimistically in national colours practise on the rough, uneven ground scattered with stones.

"I could not get a permanent place in Pakistan's national team because nobody patronises Balochistan players like they patronise cricketers from other provinces," says opening batsman Shoaib Khan.
He is the only cricketer from Balochistan to represent Pakistan at the international level in recent history, playing four T20 matches during a tour to Canada in 2008 where he was second-highest scorer with 99 runs.
Domestically, he has scored 3,695 runs in 121 innings of 65 first-class matches, with the help of seven centuries and 13 fifties -- but has not been tapped again for the national side.
Not one other player from the province has played an international Twenty20, ODI or Test match since Khan.