If there is an inch of Pakistan cricket over which is not cast the shadow of Abdul Hafeez Kardar, even now, nearly 18 years after his death and 37 years after he left the game, then that inch is an illusion. Kardarian templates abound through the game. It is his mode of captaincy – stern, unbending, aloof, authoritarian – that is, by and large, still believed to work best. It was from his bullish early beliefs that fast bowling was what Pakistan needed that a legacy was created.

It was his induction of nationalised banks in domestic cricket in the early 1970s that professionalised the sport. It was his fall after the pay dispute with his players of 1976, that overturned the balance of power between administrators and players forever; super-stardom lay in wait for the latter, clownishness for the former.

It was also Kardar who first ordained that youth be given its head. Admittedly, circumstances were thrust upon him — for in a country barely five years old at the time of its first Test and without a formal cricket infrastructure to speak of, how mature and established could its cricketers really be? A few, including Kardar, had worthwhile experience in pre-Partition India but a chunk of the earliest sides necessarily had to be young.

On the momentous 1954 tour to England, for instance, the average age of the squad was just 24 years, with only two players over 30. Kardar was happy to go lower, giving debuts on the tour to Khalid Hasan, who was two weeks from turning 17 and was the youngest Test player at the time, and Khalid Wazir, who had been 18 just over a month earlier when he played his first Test. Later, when Pakistan first toured the Caribbean in 1957 – 1958, Nasimul Ghani and Haseeb Ahsan would make their debut together in the Bridgetown Test at a combined age of 34 — just a year more than the age Kardar turned on the first day of the Test. The hero of that Test was another Kardar protégé, Hanif Mohammad, who was 17 when he made his debut a little over five years earlier.

Ahsan’s selection was especially reflective of Kardar’s vision, as it came at the cost of Zulfiqar Ahmed — who was not only older and more experienced as a spinner but was also Kardar’s brother-in-law. This was Kardar’s way: If he had the choice between an older, experienced player even in good form and a younger one also in good form, he would always go for the latter — family ties or not.

Privately, a few of Kardar’s contemporaries snipe that his preference for youth was inextricably linked to his authoritarianism: the younger the player, the easier it would be to control him. It is not a misplaced charge but Kardar’s choices post-playing suggest a degree of selflessness. Mushtaq Mohammad, who remains the second-youngest Test debutant ever, and Intikhab Alam were both picked under Kardar’s successor as captain, Fazal Mahmood. But Kardar had, usefully, become a selector by then and in his mind still a de facto, albeit non-playing, captain. And in 1975, as the head of the cricket board, he recognised that 18-year-old Javed Miandad was “the find of the decade” (he was only wrong in not pluralising the timescale) and had to be in the side. Soon, he was.

The most celebrated and definitive illustrations of Pakistan’s faith in youth – and the fruits of it – came during the time of the man most like Kardar, the Kardar 2.0. Similarly autocratic but similarly transformative, Imran Khan’s relationship with younger players fairly defined his leadership. As many as 11 teenagers made their debuts in Tests and one-day matches between the time Khan took over as captain in 1982 and left in 1992. This also happened to be one of Pakistan’s most successful periods in the game, though to draw a direct link would be narrowing the interpretation of what brings success. It is also only fair to point out that Miandad, who regularly leased the captaincy from Khan, was also responsible for some seminal teenage debuts — though he remains, as in the entire Khan-Miandad canon, vastly under-credited for it.

But Khan’s approach was revealing of what made these teenagers – and Pakistan – succeed. Waqar Younis tells a story from that famous game in Sharjah in October 1991 against the West Indies (the two girls in the crowd, praying: that one). Younis was bowling the last over of the game to Patrick Patterson and Ian Bishop. They needed 10 runs; they got eight from the first three balls, including a big ‘Bishop six’ over long-on. Younis was drained of all colour as he walked back to Khan, stationed at mid-on, avuncular as ever. “What now, Skipper?” The usual way this worked was that Khan would dispense ball-by-ball advice: yorker, bring it in, bounce him, so on. This time, he stepped away from the heat of the situation and told Younis to bowl whatever he felt in his heart was the right thing to bowl. Younis went straight and fast, two dot balls first and then bowled Bishop off the last ball to win it by a run. “I felt like that was the ultimate confidence boost I could be given,” Younis recalled, recently. “Most captains would’ve sworn [at the bowler] or something, so that was really comforting to hear.”

Khan didn’t pick young players just because they were young. He picked only those he believed in and, as we find out every day during the current phase of his political career, when Khan believes in something – wise or otherwise – he does not let go. His fearlessness in selecting and then backing the team fiercely transmitted itself into the players themselves. Having spotted Aaqib Javed at an Under-19 training camp in Lahore, Khan picked him for an exhibition game in India, to suss him out a bit more. Given a field to bowl to as he began, Javed immediately changed it, informing Khan he was predominantly an outswing bowler.

Taken aback and also delighted, Khan wondered to Mudassar Nazar who this kid was, confident enough to set his own fields. After the game, Khan told Javed that even if he couldn’t get him on the winter tour to Australia, he should consider himself a part of the side.

There was never any doubt Javed would not be taken along, and in one of his very first games (a one-day international at Adelaide Oval, Australia, on December 10, 1988), the contagion of Khan took hold. Vivian Richards came out to bat. Javed was bowling. “Maaro …[expletive deleted]… ko bouncer” (Bowl him a bouncer), Khan told him. Javed was shocked. A 16-year-old newbie bowling to one of the greatest batsmen to have lived with a hook that was as much a weapon as the bouncer itself? He did, surprising Richards in the process. “But then, I began to think like a lion and thought, I’ll bowl another to him,” Javed remembers. “When I did again, he hit me for four but that was a lesson for me. That was how Imran developed players. He would turn ordinary people into stars overnight, showing them such things, such dreams, such positives, that in one or two months people’s beliefs and thinking would change entirely.”

In the decade after Khan left, Pakistan maintained faith with his ways — twenty teenagers debuted between 1992 and 2002. Yet, unlike the batch from the previous decade, only a handful – if any at all – came close to realising the potential that brought them to attention in the first place. Quite the opposite, in fact: Imran Nazir, Hasan Raza, Shoaib Malik were all poster boys for a generation unfulfilled (if we are being strict, we could throw in Abdul Razzaq and even Shahid Afridi in that list; Mohammad Zahid is another, though he had just turned 20 when he debuted).

Talent does not overnight become greatness. Science, art, sweat, fortune and alchemy go into it. But in contrasting the fortunes of Khan’s boys against those who followed is to discover at least one undeniable element. As important as the talent that players such as Wasim Akram and Younis had was the faith Khan had in their talent and in himself in harnessing it. Of the many things players such as Malik or Raza missed, one was a figure who believed in them even more than they believed in themselves — a belief that could carry them through. It wasn’t the only thing, but it was a crucial one.

One way of appreciating what Kardar and Khan propagated is to see it as a fleeting subversion in a country where, broadly, there exists a rigid adherence to age-based hierarchy. To have faith in callow, breakable youth goes instinctively against the grain in a land where not just respect and preference to those older but also deference is so entrenched as to be stagnating. As a cursory but relevant aside, take the experience of young Pakistani captains: Permanently encircled by a group of disgruntled, conspiring seniors, they are doomed to, and do, always fail. In family life, this may be admirable – maybe – but in institutions and organisations it is counter-productive. A senior employee or player believes that it his right to prosper ahead of younger men, even those who have more aptitude for the job. Reward is for longevity, not merit or productivity. If the younger one does get ahead, fogies are, at once, in motion trying to bring down the upstart. Bob Woolmer saw it and tried, unsuccessfully, to make the captain Inzamamul Haq more accessible and open – a dad, not a father – to younger players.

So, in this last, troubled decade, the subversion has been gradually muted. Only twelve teenagers have debuted for Pakistan since the start of 2002. The last, great pronouncement of belief in the virtues of youth came in 2003, with Aamer Sohail’s wholesale culling of Pakistan’s senior players after the World Cup. Over the last three years, under the captaincy of Misbah-ul-Haq in particular, the Test squad is widely acknowledged to be the least young Pakistan has fielded.

To some extent, this has been a deliberate swing from faith to distrust; compelled by what many saw as the detritus of the young men who debuted right after Khan in the 1990s, on the theory that he laid out but without his presence to implement. Discussing an Under-19 star who had disappeared into the ether, Iqbal Qasim expanded a few years ago on this new policy: “It is a weird pattern for us that if a player succeeds at Under-19, we should play him immediately for Pakistan.” Qasim was, at the time, involved with the selection committee and has served as both junior and senior selector in various stints over the decade.

“You have to make quality players; you have to take some time over them. You have to work with them at various stages; at first-class level, in the Under-19 and ‘A’ sides. They need two, three years in these teams before they come up. We are trying to change the idea that you pick them young, then discard them. Even Woolmer said, if you play a guy at 14, how on earth is he expected to cope with what is happening to him?” is how Qasim explained the new thinking.

Ironically, part of this shift has also been due to the very structures designed to enable younger talent to emerge. Though the number of Under-19 and ‘A’ team tours and fixtures has fallen sharply over the last five years (one fatality of the Lahore terror attacks of March 2009 and the subsequent banishment of Pakistan as a cricket venue), over the 2000s there have been more Under-19 tours and tournaments, more age-level domestic tournaments than at any time before. In theory, it should mean younger players coming through in bigger numbers. The natural flip side, though, is that this level becomes a kind of filter, weeding out talent and casting it aside. More players might have got an opportunity but that also means more fates are being decided at an earlier stage, correctly or otherwise: This system may not have produced more players for the senior team, but it has prevented many of those who might have been right to make it.

That, perhaps, is one conclusion to be drawn from the fate of Pakistan’s hugely successful sides this century at Under-19 cricket world cups. Twice winners in 2004 and 2006, semi-finalists in 2008 and runners-up in 2010 and yet, from those four squads, three or maybe four players, are regulars at senior level now. Maybe a majority of the rest were simply not good enough?

The game, if not Pakistan, has moved on. Today, not even the force of Khan could counter the use of technology, for example, to open up chinks in the armour of a fresh young player soon after he has arrived. The first-class scene is so unimaginably vast and rickety that it is inevitable players will slip through the many cracks (perfectly natural is to ask whether it has ever been any other way). And despite being in possession of a well-equipped academy in Lahore, the Pakistan Cricket Board has somehow managed to make it not work especially well in developing younger players.

We should, though, ask ourselves whether it even matters that teenagers are no longer breaking through to the national side. There are enough cases in Pakistan, and around the world, of players coping better because they have arrived late, matured and grown in wisdom by years of graft while playing domestically. Talent – if it is robust – will eventually find a way through: That is the lesson of the spread of the game in Pakistan. But ask yourself this, too — a potential clincher: Despite the current side being one of the oldest that Pakistan has fielded, have they shed any of the several central traits of even Pakistan’s youngest sides? Have we stopped expecting anything other than what we have always expected of Pakistan? That is, on any given day, in any given game, nothing, everything and anything — young, old or neither?