Middle-age has different ways of making its presence felt. Joint pains get clingy after having you at hello; calcium pills become part of hand baggage; you learn to be stoic to Kishore Kumar being remixed and, worse, one of his songs adding heft to a deodorant jingle. But when Pakistan’s World Cup campaign begins to look like a chronicle of a demise foretold, it can feel like a blow below the bulge.
Because there was a time when, weaned on the English county circuit, they were Asia’s galacticos, a team so rich in flamboyance and defiance that it could make the mighty West Indies blink; Pakistan almost did in the 1975 World Cup till Andy Roberts and Deryck Murray rescued a win with a 64-run last-wicket stand.
They had a team where Majid Khan stood tall to Andy Roberts and Dennis Lillee, where Zaheer Abbas got runs, where Asif Iqbal and Mushtaq Mohammed added muscle to the middle order before Imran Khan and Sarfaraz Nawaz got into the swing of things.
Bright start
Pakistan made the semi-finals in three of the first four editions of the World Cup, won it in 1992 and again made the final in 1999 when the World Cup was last held in England, one generation of stalwarts making way for another.
“We just carried a lot of negativity and self-doubt when we left our shores. While we would easily lose to England, Pakistan would go there and hammer them,” Sanjay Manjrekar wrote in ‘Imperfect’, his autobiography, where he also talks about how Imran Khan “matched, perhaps surpassed, Sunil Gavaskar as my cricket idol.”
One-day cricket was different then and so were Pakistan, as far from a state of decline as Imran was to being a Prime Minister. But everything happens for a reason; and perhaps part of the decline can be explained by Pakistan’s international exclusion, following the 2009 terror attack on Sri Lanka cricketers.
“It is one of the big reasons. When you play in front of your home crowd, it is a different ball game altogether. We are playing our home series in Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. It is tough on the players and affects their families too as the players are out almost eight months out of 12,” said Intikhab Alam, the former Pakistan captain who was also the manager-cum-coach in the 1992 World Cup.
“The ecosystem of cricket — and this includes everything from the sponsors the board attracts to the understanding of the game among the cricket-following fraternity — has stagnated as cricket has been outsourced,” wrote Hassan Cheema in espncricinfo in October 2016.
With international commitments eating into the possibility of regular county summers, with Pakistan players being barred from the Indian Premier League, cricket’s best finishing school, can you blame this largely young team for looking like radio stars in the age of the video? Or Waqar Younis for saying, “this India team intimidates Pakistan”?
No team can improve by being cricket nomads but it could be reductive to blame ordinary batting, bowling (barring Mohammad Amir) and poor fielding in this World Cup entirely on what happened over a decade ago.
“You need a vision, the World Cup comes every four years and you have to start preparing in advance, to find out the type of batsmen and bowlers you need. We failed in that. I don’t think the coaches worked on that. (In the World Cup), we lacked cricketing sense,” said Alam.
Pakistan repeatedly changing their playing 11 in this World Cup could be because of this lack of vision.
“We will rock you,” is a song played so regularly at World Cup venues that you can’t have missed it this summer. For fans of a certain age, it would be beyond tragic if Pakistan’s campaign in this World Cup came to be defined by a line from a different Queen song: “So don’t become some background noise/A backdrop for the girls and boys/Who just don’t know or just don’t care.”
(With inputs from Sanjjeev Samyal)
First Published: Jun 22, 2019 20:39 IST
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