YOUNG cueist Naseem Akhtar’s brilliant title win in the IBSF World Under-18 Snooker Championship in Beijing early this month has largely gone unnoticed. It seems the euphoria of our cricket team’s victory at the Champions Trophy has dominated sports news in the country. But that does not take away anything from the 16-year-old’s tremendous achievement. Naseem’s precocious demolition of home favourite Peifan Lei of China in the prestigious event has made the critics sit up and take note. In fact, Pakistan has produced quite a few international-level snooker champions since Mohammad Yousuf’s world snooker win in 1994 at Johannesburg. It was that victory which inspired an entire generation of cueists to take up the sport and excel in it. The names include 2012 world champion Mohammad Asif, Asian Snooker winner Hamza Akbar, the recent Asian 6-Red snooker winner Mohammad Sajjad, world snooker finalist Saleh Mohammad and many others.

However, Naseem’s win is unique in the annals of Pakistan snooker because it is the first by any cueist at the underage level. The Sahiwal-born Naseem, who is also national junior champion, lost only two frames in his four knockout phase victories before the final in Beijing, and his run-up to the title clash included his 4-0 semi-final drubbing of Israeli Amir Nardeia. But while Naseem has proved his excellence, he is discouraged by the government’s negligible patronage of the sport and bemoans the lack of facilities even in major cities which is, indeed, lamentable. Cricket’s popularity may have overshadowed almost every other sport in the country, but it is essentially the government’s step-motherly treatment of medal sports such as hockey, squash, boxing, snooker, wrestling and the martial arts that has caused the regression of Pakistan’s sports at the international level. Not a single Olympic medal has come our way since the 1992 Barcelona Games which reflects a shambolic state of affairs. Indeed, it is a matter of shame for a nation of 200 million.

Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2017