When it opened in the spring of 2008, the Multipurpose Sports Complex in F6 markaz became the Mecca for fanatics of football, basketball and tennis, providing first class facilities and an enjoyable sporting experience to all the public living in the capital.
Owned by the Capital Development authority, (CDA) the multipurpose center was a Sportsman’s dream with its superb tennis and basketball courts, fiber-glass boards, massive floodlights and a football ground that introduced a high quality artificial turf to citizens comprising of young teenagers to people in their mid twenties.
For about a good three, four years the center garnered a lot of attraction and attention and was a popular place to go to for walks and spending time with the family in healthy outdoor activities. The center used a membership process, but also allowed easy booking on a daily basis for reasonable fees which everyone had no problem with.
Recently however, like with everything the CDA and the Government seems to have a hand in, the multipurpose complex saw a slow and steady decline.
Not properly maintained and overused, the facilities began deteriorating and are now a shadow of its former self. The basketball has mini-craters in it and the football ground has areas where the turf has been worn and torn away, revealing almost bare concrete. Litter is to be found in almost every corner of the center while the booking process has become a lot more complicated now.
There has been a raise in the rates charged to book the ground and if anything the facility seems more like a black hole for sucking away people’s money than it is a place where people can come for a positive experience. Costing Rs. 1,400 to book for an hour when it started (during the day) the price has gone up to different amounts, depending on how well you know the person at the ground.
At night, the price is even higher but ironically the facility is not allowed to make use of its floodlights for certain prescribed periods of load shedding, despite the fact that they have a generator. In fact, there was one incident where the police actually showed up and made the groundkeeper switch the generator off because it was violating the absurd rule.
Osama Khalid a student of NUST University who plays over there regularly has the same question that everybody else does, “when are they going to repair it?”
Raamis Abdul Haq, another student asks “Why have they made it so difficult to book the ground now?”
While Altamash Chaudhry, an standard citizen commented “It was such a fantastic experience to come to the center and watch and play different sports, but now it has dried away and nothing is being done to maintain the high standards it had set for itself.”
The answer to all these nagging questions by the ground keepers who watch over the proceedings is “Next month we will clean it up” and “Soon the charging and booking of grounds will become simpler” but no such thing has been done yet to indicate their statements true.
Surely, the government would be supporting the idea of a healthy sporting activity for the people of the city to escape load shedding and other issues?
If one walks into the ground now, they will see a worn down facility that just needs a little bit of investment and work to take it back to what it was in the beginning.
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