“There was no scope in cricket. We used to think playing sport was a waste of time, so I insisted that Auqib focused on his studies,” Ghulam says.<\/p>\n
But Auqib’s persistence eventually changed his father’s mind.<\/p>\n
“After seeing his passion for cricket, I accepted it. I realised that, as a parent and a teacher, I shouldn’t force him to do something he didn’t want to do. I started supporting him.”<\/p>\n
Auqib’s childhood friend, Junaid Dar, remembers growing up in an environment where professional cricket barely seemed possible.<\/p>\n
“Auqib was obsessed with cricket from childhood. I used to ask him, ‘Why are you doing all this? There’s no future in it.’ We came from a place where there was no concept of playing sport professionally and hardly any infrastructure.”<\/p>\n
To pursue his dream, Auqib regularly travelled around 70km (43 miles) to Srinagar to practise on proper cricket pitches. He did not even own a pair of spike shoes when he attended his first cricket trials.<\/p>\n
But his work ethic never changed, his cousin Bilal says.<\/p>\n
“Auqib is very hardworking and consistent. He knows how to fight obstacles and make a way for himself.<\/p>\n
“He would wake up early to go to the gym and then practise for the rest of the day. He did that almost every day for 10 years.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“There was no scope in cricket. We used to think playing sport was a waste of time, so…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-732249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}