A week after the West Indians wrapped themselves with glory in their own inimitable style and manner, there is hardly a point to make even a mention of it except that this was one more glimpse of the larger argument about why the team is so crucial to the world of cricket. When the West Indians win, everyone wins with them.

Their skills — whenever they are able to put them on display — are so breathless, and their celebrations — whenever they match the occasion — are so uninhibited and original that the whole thing becomes contagious. May the tribe grow and sustain itself!

The bitterness underlining the friction between the players and the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) raised its ugly head at the awards presentation ceremony and the post-match events. It is here that we, in Pakistan, have a lesson to learn. The West Indians used their friction to raise their game and expressed their frustration once they had redeemed themselves on the field. Pakistanis tend to do it the other way round, going public with their frustration — justified or otherwise — without making things work on the ground.

The West Indians used their friction to raise their game and expressed their frustration once they had done well on the field. We do it the other way round

The ill-conceived Shahid Afridi show is a recent and relevant example of it. Before leaving for India, he made public statements and invited prime ministerial intervention into cricketing affairs. He went there, didn’t do much to be noticed, did a lot to suggest that he was not good enough, came back and used the social media to seek forgiveness. It all reeked of showmanship when all he needed to do was to focus on the assignment in the first phase, and introspection in the second. But if he couldn’t do his ‘star man’ stunt on the field — with his tummy almost bursting out from his waistline — he thought he would pull off his ‘star man on the sofa’ stunt to extend his tenure as a player.

“I am here to answer to you,” he was seen saying in the video. “... I seek forgiveness from you because the hopes you had from me and my team, I could not live up to them.” His body language was anything but apologetic, and the mass reaction it attracted on various websites where either the video or its content was shared was harsh and sarcastic. The Boom Boom stunt rather boomeranged.

Come to think of it, what exactly was he seeking forgiveness for? For not living up to expectations? But the team he led actually came up to the expectations, and that, indeed, was the problem. People with any degree of sanity and logic pasted over their patriotism never thought the team was going to do anything big.

And those who actually believed it will do well represented a miniscule minority for people have spent enough time in the ‘la la’ land (pun very much intended and stressed!) to fool themselves with rhetoric. The best chance anyone gave to the team was through some freak feat — some batsman coming with good with the ball or some bowler doing the trick with the bat. That didn’t happen. The batsmen played to their potential. The bowlers bowled to their potential. The fielders played to their potential. And, indeed, the captain led the side to his utmost potential. The key word, as anyone can see, was potential. It was not good on paper and it was not good on the field. No apologies were due on that count.

The cricket board itself was on record telling everyone that Afridi had been given the captaincy against a promise to call it a day after the World Cup. No Afridi has cunningly found a caveat; leaving the captaincy, but sticking on to his place as a player. The show continues at the time of writing these lines.

There is word all around is that changes are in the offing, and the Board is preparing for something slightly more substantial than interchanging portfolios among the blue-eyed. The track record of such preparations are good enough to remind one of the preparations the Sindh government is said to be doing to handle extreme whether that is expected in the summer months from May to August.

Last year, if one might remember, the heatwave had taken close to a couple of thousand lives in the province. A recent news report in national media highlighted the various measures being taken to manage another potential crisis this year. For starters, hospitals were being put on alert to manage cases of heatstroke. The next step is to convince mortuaries to increase their capacity to hold on to bodies that would be brought to them. And the final part of the plan is to have more space in the graveyards. One doesn’t even need to comment on the direction of these preparations. The plan is based on the simple belief that lives would be lost. No one has bothered to run some awareness campaign to advise people to stay in the shade during the afternoons, and there is hardly any point to suggest that the government should have done something about the power outages that are behind many a tragedy.

Call it funny. Call it unfortunate. Call it whatever. This is the way we plan things in Pakistan. The word coming out (read leaked) from PCB corridors suggests the planners there are seriously impressed by the manner of those who are planning to manage the impending heatwave. Let’s look up to the skies.

humair.ishtiaq@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 10th, 2016