TANVEER AHMED BAIG

PIA engineer, first-class fast-medium bowler and the Karachi coach who never cut a boy

The first time Tanveer Baig bowled at the nets of Karachi's National Stadium he was seventeen, wearing borrowed spikes two sizes too large, and with his second delivery he took the middle stump out of the ground. Born in Lyari in 1946, the son of a railway porter, he had learned the game with a tennis ball wrapped in tape, in lanes where a plank was a bat and a handcart made the stumps.

In 1966 he joined Pakistan International Airlines as an apprentice aircraft engineer and spent forty years in the hangars at Jinnah International Airport, keeping Boeings and Fokkers safe. He also played first-class cricket for the PIA team and for Karachi through the late sixties and seventies, a fast-medium bowler with a slingy action and a hundred and twelve first-class wickets, never quite enough for a Test cap but enough, he said, to be recognised by every rickshaw driver on Tariq Road. When his playing days ended he turned to coaching, running free evening nets for neighbourhood boys on a dusty ground in Nazimabad, with one rule: no boy is ever cut. Several of his players went on to first-class cricket; most became engineers, bankers and shopkeepers who still called him Coach.

He loved nihari on Sunday mornings, listened to Test commentary on a transistor radio he refused to replace, and told the same joke about a camel and a cricket bat at every wedding. He died peacefully at home on 22 April 2019, aged seventy-two, after a long illness treated at the Aga Khan University Hospital, where his daughter works as a physician. He leaves his wife Shahida, his sons Faisal and Adnan, his daughter Dr. Sadia and six grandchildren, who play cricket in the family courtyard with a tape-wrapped tennis ball.

“A boy who is left out learns to stop trying. So nobody gets left out.”