SO MUCH THAT IS MEMORABLE about Pakistani cricket seems to be embodied in the tape-ball. The tape-ball is a humble object, born out of necessity: a tennis ball that is first bandaged tight in electrical tape, and then deployed in pick-up cricket games across Pakistan. It is pressed into action amidst stark circumstances: cracked footpaths, maidans of congealed dust, crowded lanes and muddy farms—uninspiring surroundings that reliably produce inspired cricketers. Upon these inconstant surfaces, the tape-ball stays firm, skids, and leaps upon the batsman, filling a fast bowler’s sails with encouragement and sweetening him on the prospect of bowling ever quicker. Razor a slit into the tape on one side of the ball, and it will careen in or out late on its way to the batsman—a phenomenon linked to the physics of reverse swing, and thence to the burning desire to engineer this swing discreetly by picking away the tape with a fingernail. The tape-ball creates drama, and cricket in Pakistan is nothing if not drama.
As the tape-ball is to Pakistani cricket, so Pakistani cricket is to Pakistan itself. That latter metaphor is, let us acknowledge it, impossible to escape. Indeed, isn’t that part of the appeal of myth-making in sport? As we once did with armies, we look to sports teams to gauge the moral fibre of their members, and then we think we have a handle on the characters of their cities, or even their countries. What extrapolative folly this appears to be when laid out in cold, hard print—and yet, how tempting it is to be persuaded that the metaphor is watertight in the case of Pakistan.
So much that is memorable about Pakistan seems to be embodied in its cricket. To the outsider, it can look hopeless, barely held together by corrupt or impoverished governing bodies, its structures rickety and its psyche tortured. Giant wills and egos clash with frightening frequency. Individuals of mad talent emerge from nowhere, hum with promise, and then contrive to hobble themselves. Fortunes swing from month to month. Life is uncertain. Mood is everything. And yet, despite all this swirling chaos, the cricketers delight audiences, the team wins matches, the country soldiers on.
Over the past year, two new books, both stout, have endeavoured not only to chronicle the history of Pakistani cricket but also to probe the ties that so intimately bind sport to nation. The first is Wounded Tiger, by Peter Oborne, the former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph and the author of Basil D’Oliveira, a life of the steel-willed Cape Coloured all-rounder. The second is The Unquiet Ones, by Osman Samiuddin, an editor of Cricinfo’s The Cricket Monthly and a reporter (as I am) with The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi. Each book is strong and incisive in its own right, and consumed in tandem they compensate for each other’s stray deficiencies, as if they were the Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis of cricket literature. Their titles—Samiuddin’s an original, Oborne’s a tweak of Imran Khan’s mythical pep talk to his players during their triumphant run in the 1992 World Cup, urging them to fight like “cornered tigers”—hint at the character of the histories they narrate: restless and combative, perennially exciting and perennially troubled.
TO PLAY INTERNATIONAL CRICKET, Pakistan first had to be deprived of it.
A still-united India played its inaugural Test match at Lord’s in 1932, and then another nine Tests before August 1947. When the British partitioned the subcontinent, the Imperial Cricket Conference, which governed the sport, retained only the new India as a full member. The Board of Control for Cricket in India had remained in Bombay; “India had the money, infrastructure, assets, organisation and best pitches,” Oborne notes. This left Pakistan and the cricketers who chose to live there—some of whom, like Jahangir Khan and Abdul Hafeez Kardar, had already played Test matches—in the lurch. Fazal Mahmood, Pakistan’s first great quick, was 20 years old at the time of Partition and itching to bowl overseas. Even as millions of Muslims fled India for Pakistan, Fazal travelled in the other direction, from Lahore through Bombay to Poona, trying to reach a camp training cricketers for India’s winter tour of Australia. The squad included Fazal because it had been picked months earlier, when India and Pakistan had expected to be granted their independence only in 1948.
Fazal’s was, Oborne writes, “an insanely dangerous journey,” and it came to nothing. The camp, inundated by the monsoons, was called off early, and Fazal struggled to return to Pakistan. On the train from Poona to Bombay, a furious Hindu mob threatened to attack him; only the intervention of India’s first captain, CK Nayudu, past a half-century in age but sturdy and armed with a bat, kept the assailants at bay. Fazal flew on to Lahore, and then, shaken finally by the savagery of Partition, cabled to say that he would not be touring Australia. Instead, he enlisted in the police force and was dispatched to a village near the Afghan border. “I was so disheartened that I wanted to leave the game altogether,” he wrote later in his memoir, “because at that time the future of the game in Pakistan looked to be totally dark.”
Illumination came from Fazal himself, as well as from his quick-witted captain Kardar and the batting prodigy Hanif Mohammad, the trinity that made the first decade of Pakistani cricket a buoyant one. Here was the preliminary evidence that Pakistan would prove to be a surprising side, both easy and dangerous to underestimate.
In 1952, Pakistan won its second-ever Test by an innings—against India in Lucknow, no less, where Fazal took 12 for 94, on the sort of matting wicket he revelled upon back home but that was less common in other countries. Then the team drew a debut series in England in 1954, losing their second Test but winning famously at the Oval; Fazal shone again, with 12 more wickets. Next, Pakistan beat New Zealand twice on the trot and then Australia once, all at home. When the team went to the West Indies in 1958, it was defeated 1-3, but that matters less than the Test it drew: the very first, in Barbados, in which a 23-year-old Hanif sweated out 337 runs, drip by parsimonious drip over 999 minutes, to save the game. He batted so long that the light bouncing brightly off the pitch charred the flesh under his eyes. “It was the grandest inversion,” Samiuddin writes. “Most people spend lives trying to stay young, fighting time; in this innings, Hanif discarded his own youth, taking solace in the passing of time.”
Already this was the prototypical Pakistani side, a loose collection of journeymen and superstars who might have been randomly assembled five minutes earlier on a Karachi playground. The team was riven by infighting, most notably between Fazal and Kardar, who had more or less refused to play at all unless asked to lead the side, a role that might otherwise have gone to Fazal’s father-in-law, an ageing but still solid batsman named Mian Mohammad Saeed. Kardar himself was a prototype: a charismatic Oxford graduate whose averages were of less significance than his ability to pull his team together. “He used to handle all practices and used to often go player by player, watching over all of them,” Hanif told Samiuddin. At a training camp, “we were taught how to eat, how to speak and all these things.”
Kardar loomed over the first quarter-century of Pakistani cricket, first as captain of the team and then as chief of the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan, or BCCP, which had been founded, practically broke, in 1948. He transformed the BCCP from what was in essence an institution living out of its tin trunk of documents into one with a new, four-room office attached to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore. His administrative career gleamed with rare personal integrity; he was prepared to resign as board president if his son Shahid entered first-class cricket, a circumstance that never came to pass because Shahid went to study economics at Oxford instead. But Kardar also “ruled like an absolute, and by no means always benevolent, monarch,” Oborne writes. The eternal political dilemma, of how to feel about the autocrat who does genuinely good work, presents itself. Kardar always thought he knew best, and it didn’t help matters that, often, he really did. “I have come to the conclusion,” he wrote after being overruled in a selection meeting, “that democratic methods do not get the desired results.”
Had Pakistan at the time been a more settled, more secure country, it would perhaps not have tolerated the iron reign of Kardar—or, for that matter, of President Ayub Khan, the army general who ran Pakistan from 1958 to 1969, presiding over years of healthy economic growth. “Retrospect presents Ayub in a compelling light, more so probably than at any time he was actually leading … Yet, he also had a high-minded suspicion of parliamentary democracy,” Samiuddin writes of the president, an analysis that might apply just as well to Kardar.
For both Ayub and Kardar, the centre did not hold. Ayub left office two years before the fission of Pakistan in 1971, although he must have known, throughout his tenure, about the growing anger and resentment in the eastern limb of his country. No native East Pakistani ever played Test cricket for Pakistan; the closest anyone came was Raqibul Hasan, who was dropped several times from the final XI, and who tells Samiuddin, decades later, “I felt there was a little conspiracy against me and it did hurt.” Even as the country prepared to boil over with political unrest, the BCCP tried to do its bit for unity, picking Raqibul for a domestic game against a Commonwealth XI in Dhaka in February 1971. He scored only one in each innings, but he did tell his teammate Zaheer Abbas to be sure to bring his passport the next time he came to Dhaka.
This was an irony, for it has been the cricket quizzer’s abiding joy to point out that the very first Pakistani city to host a Test was, in fact, Dhaka, in 1955—one of the many atrophic draws that India and Pakistan, petrified of losing to each other, played out in those early decades. Despite its size and importance, though, Dhaka was still dwarfed by Lahore and Karachi, which carved up Pakistan’s cricket culture between themselves.
Samiuddin beautifully parses the different spirits that animated cricket in those two cities: Lahore’s well-organised games on grand grounds, produced cricketers of aristocratic mien, such as Kardar and Imran Khan, who seemed born to play the game; and Karachi’s fragmented cricket, played on streets, parks and the occasional, inadequate ground, producing scrappy fighters such as Hanif and the batsman Javed Miandad. Vividly, Samiuddin describes a moment during a 1993 Test in New Zealand in which Miandad fielded at square leg and then, shaping to throw at the umpire’s end of the wicket, whipped the ball instead at the striker’s stumps. It was, Samiuddin writes, “Miandad more than any other innings or shot: ever alive to opportunity, always ahead of the game, prodigiously gifted and with an instinct sharpened by a permanent sense of desperation which produces just the right response to any situation.”
IN INDIA, cricket is perceived to have truly spread out of its metropolises only after the recent, bat-whirling advent of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who grew up in Ranchi. In Pakistan, however, that process began earlier, in the waning years of the 1970s. Mushtaq Ahmed, whom Oborne writes about at length, started out bowling his scampering leg-breaks for hours at a tree in a village in Punjab, many miles from Lahore. Tennis balls were too expensive, Mushtaq wrote in his memoir Twenty20 Vision, so often “we would put a cheap plastic football into very hot water until it melted and shrank to the size of a cricket ball.”
In ways that neither Oborne nor Samiuddin quite manages to pin down—although they have energetic stabs at it—Pakistan has reliably unearthed its most outrageous talents and pulled them, as inexorably as gravity, into the national team. “We don’t come through the system,” Imran once told the journalist Suresh Menon, “because we don’t have a system.” A rival school poached Mushtaq from his own resource-strapped Mehmoodia High; then a biscuit manufacturer sponsored his cricket gear. In 1988, a month after Imran spotted Aaqib Javed at a training camp, the young fast bowler received a phone call instructing him to turn up at the Lahore airport to join the squad for a tour of India. In his first international series, Wasim Akram was still so green that he wasn’t aware he’d be paid to play. The Unquiet Ones discusses Pakistan’s cricket scouts and muscular ecosystem of school cricket, but there is something more ineffable in how senior stars such as Imran have felt almost a moral responsibility to find and nourish their successors. Talent calls out to talent, at a frequency unheard by the rest of us. It constitutes one of the loveliest mysteries of Pakistani cricket.
By the time Imran’s team won the 1992 World Cup, radio and television had seeded the game in every corner of the country. During one of his dozen trips to Pakistan to research his book, Oborne travelled to Peshawar, where he was followed by operatives of Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s top spy agency, and then on through the north-west, where cricket had been proscribed by the resident tribes ever since the Raj, for being an imported and alien sport. Even here, however, the sport has burst forth like a hardy little sapling.
In the tehsil of Shakai, in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, for two decades now, teams have competed in the 15-over-a-side Badshah Khan tournament, marching to the ground to martial drumbeats and playing in their baggy tribal attire. Cricket continues even as Pakistani jets bomb Taliban holdouts on an adjacent mountain. (Members of the Taliban, meanwhile, source generators from local electricians to be able to watch important Pakistan games on television.) In Swat, in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Oborne sees “very little level ground in this rugged and mountainous area, yet every piece seemed to have been colonised by cricketers. In the village of Null, in middle Swat, I found a game in progress besides a river, flowing fast with glacial melt.” For all its modern urban pomp, cricket still breathes best in the countryside, where the longer, slower rhythms of life and sport settle into neat alignment.
The growth of television, and the related rise in the subcontinent’s importance in the cricketing world over the past two decades, has left the game awash in money. No young player now will be unaware, as Wasim once was, that international cricket is a paying profession. The money has brought stability; it has also brought temptation. “A new element is coming,” an ageing Kardar told his son. “The greed that you see now, they will not be able to handle it.” Bookies had consorted with Pakistani players even in the 1980s—a team doctor recalled one, “a big fat man,” riding the squad bus to the ground during the 1979-80 tour of India—but the fixing infection properly flared during the subsequent decade.
A few cleanses have been administered to the body of Pakistani cricket. In 2000, Justice Malik Qayyum recommended a life ban for the batsman Salim Malik based on “clear evidence of match-fixing,” but other suspects paid fines and continued to play. (Five years after tabling his report, Justice Qayyum acknowledged a soft corner for Wasim, one of the cricketers who was fined but not banned. “He was a very great player, a very great bowler, and I was his fan,” he told Cricinfo. “I didn’t want cricket deprived of his participation.”) Three Pakistani cricketers were convicted in London in 2011 of spot-fixing, receiving prison sentences and bans of varying length. But the whispers strike up every time Pakistan performs poorly. “To this day,” Oborne writes, “a cloud of suspicion still surrounds any Pakistan cricketer who goes out to play for his country, especially if … he has an off-day or makes a bad decision.”
To this moral stain has been added a second trauma, of physical dislocation. After terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore during a 2009 visit, Pakistan has hosted no international games at all. In such exile, the team tours other countries, and it schedules its “home” games in the United Arab Emirates. The inability to play in Pakistan, to feel behind your back the primal roar of a stadium filled with supporters, has sapped the team’s morale, as its various captains have told reporters over the years. “It also threatens one of the great romantic traditions of Pakistan cricket—the teenage prodigy or the forgotten journeyman who turns up at a practice session and dazzles the stars,” Oborne writes. “If those stars are never at home, what hope is there for the next Wasim Akram or Tauseef Ahmed to become an overnight sensation?” A sad circle is complete. Once more, as after Partition, international cricket has fled Pakistan altogether.
PART OF THE PLEASURE of reading both The Unquiet Ones and Wounded Tiger lies in their authors’ willingness to roam the smaller byways of history. Oborne dredges archives to flesh out an infamous incident from a 1955–56 tour, in which visiting English players abducted a Pakistani umpire, brought him back to their hotel, and emptied buckets of water over him. Samiuddin presents evocative little portraits of the characters in Pakistani cricket broadcasting, and he tells with gusto the tale of how, between 1976 and 1978, a clutch of cricketers rebelled against Kardar and his board, demanding better pay. To Oborne, we turn for the story of women’s cricket in Pakistan; to Samiuddin, for that of Sharjah, that improbable cricketing outpost in the desert.
Both authors organise their material around the titans of Pakistani cricket—Kardar and Fazal and Hanif, Imran and Miandad, the leg-spinner Abdul Qadir, Waqar and Wasim—a sensible strategy that reaps dividends by way of anecdotes, and that illustrates the evolution of the game. Less successfully, both books inflict upon themselves a mandate to describe nearly every international series Pakistan has played. Here the life and colour that otherwise pulse through these books drain right out, in passages so bereft of vignettes that they’re clearly culled from scorecards. Here, for instance, is Oborne:
Zaheer, with a runner for a serious leg injury, rescued their first innings, with much help from Sarfraz, who enjoyed himself hugely with his highest score of 90, as Pakistan’s lead swelled to 102. After another brilliant century, Gower declared and set Pakistan 243 to win. Mohsin scored a rapid century, Shoaib 80 and Pakistan reached 173 without loss.
The eyes glaze over; this is just data, not fodder for the imagination.
Identically also, both books lose some of their vigour and originality as they enter this century, for similar reasons: contemporary board archives are not open for research, players are less accessible, memoirs have yet to be written. But perhaps it is difficult to convey the enormity of a crisis while still neck-deep within it. Much like Pakistan, Pakistani cricket finds itself in spiritual disrepair, beset by corruption and dirty politics, worn down by the troubles of a deeply divided society. It could all become even more awful in as yet unfathomable ways, but it could also take a turn for the better. There isn’t a cricket fan alive who does not fondly wish for the return of the sport to this country: a Test match in progress at the Gaddafi Stadium, time unwrapping slowly, the white-flannelled cricketers on the green field calling up nothing so much as the white-upon-green of the flag of Pakistan.