COMMENT: Plight of the Pakistani fan

PAKISTAN cricket lies in disarray, yet its caretakers continue to dance on its exhausted and crumpled body. The patient is in extremis, yet instead of being nursed and resuscitated, there is a scramble to pick his rotting bones clean of whatever pieces of flesh still remain. Soon there will be no flesh left to pick. By then, the scavengers will be long gone.

With tired eyes and defeated minds, the fans look toward the heavens but find no relief. The team is adrift, the players lost and scattered, the coach dead – dead, but not buried. The outgoing captain, a hero until yesterday, has become bitter and resentful, and an incoming captain seems fearful and reluctant.

Meanwhile, a discredited PCB conducts an eyewash investigation into its own mistakes, and a jaded public has no choice but to expect more of the same.

Time was when you cut school and bought a two-rupee ticket to see the Pakistan team at National Stadium. You sat in the sun and had a merry time as your beloved cricketers played for national honour in the field. When the team played abroad, you crowded around an oversized transistor radio, listening to the crisp and crackle of Omar Kureishi and Jamsheed Marker.

There were few controversies, and the only scandal of note was Nazar Mohammad sitting on the balcony with Madam Noor Jehan. Cricket was still a sport then, and it was all about the cricket.

Pakistani fans have now been taken far away from the game. Instead of reading Wisden (which has named Mohammad Yousuf one of the five cricketers of 2006), they are looking up titles like Practical Homicide Investigation and Criminology. Instead of discussing batting technique or fielding lapses, they are discussing signs of aconite poisoning and causes of hyoid bone fracture.

Time was when the saddest event in Pakistan cricket was the one-wicket loss from a winning position against West Indies in the inaugural World Cup in 1975. Generations of cricketers and fans pointed to this crushing disappointment as the darkest blemish in their cricketing memory. How that has changed.

Today we are mourning preliminary-round exits two World Cups in a row. Failure to make the top six in 2003 has progressed to failure to make the top eight in 2007.

Time was when Pakistan cricket’s worst scandals were pay disputes between the board and the players, or journalist gossip about Javed Miandad and Imran Khan not seeing eye to eye. Those champions knew how to have a good time and were often tabloid fodder, but we loved them because they made cricket their unquestioned priority and they were really, really good at it.

The tragedy for Pakistani fans is that we have come so far away from the game, cricketing issues now seem secondary. Mohammad Asif’s seaming genius, Shoaib Malik’s captaincy potential, and Yousuf’s ability to pick the line early, all seem irrelevant in the face of today’s macabre menu of tragic developments – favoritism, nepotism, doping, match-fixing, murder, you name it.

Back in 1951, when Kardar and his team secured victory over England at Karachi Gymkhana in a match that brought Pakistan official Test status, they could not have imagined the depths to which Pakistan cricket has now plunged. How could something that started so innocently and became so great be ruined so badly? The answer, in a nutshell, is that we have failed to institutionalize the game.

Failure to check the petty human urges of players and administrators has brought us to the current situation where the national team is neck-deep in controversy, the board is chasing its own tail, and domestic cricket has become meaningless. Pummelled and pounded, the fans are numb and speechless. If this goes on much longer, they will simply stop caring, as they have done with hockey and squash.

If something is not done soon, we will be in danger of falling behind even Bangladesh. This is neither joke nor sarcasm. Bangladesh have closely studied the best cricket system in the world – Cricket Australia – and are in the process of implementing the Australian model and its values at all levels, from grassroots up to the Test team and the cricket board.

This is a long-term investment, and the people undertaking it will not see its dividends during their own tenure and they might not even get credit for it. Yet they are doing it because they have the best interests of their country’s cricket at heart. If only we could speak the same of our own cricket administrators.