The quality of the matches in the second edition of the Pakistan Super League was twice as good as in the first edition. The sustained intensity of the contest was definitely better. And taking that as a sign of things to come, one can already start looking forward to the third edition. It’s fun to watch; fun to follow. Simply put, the PSL brand is gathering momentum, and that is only great.
As for the final, it was all colours and sounds. The match itself was not quite a cracker of a contest, but it was some relief that there were no other crackers either (if you know what that means!) Political, predisposed and naïve rhetoric apart, the claim that international cricket stands revived in the country makes for a rather tall claim even if you account for the fact that everything went smoothly. While Brand PSL is moving on, what is not gathering momentum is Brand Pakistan, and that is only understandable. That it was not quite as understandable to those running the show is actually irksome.
While we can make anything of the final having been played at Lahore and feel happy that ‘we have shown to the world what we are made of’, let’s for a brief moment put ourselves in a foreigner’s shoes (this is different from ‘foreign’ shoes that we all love, by the way), to see what Brand Pakistan suffered amid all this.
Everything went right — in fact, great — at the PSL. But there is no harm taking some critical lessons out of it
With every single player going public with his decision to stay away from the final in Lahore, Pakistan’s image took a hit. With every single commentator saying they were better off staying away, Pakistan’s image took a hit. With the production firm refusing to come over, the image took a hit. With HawkEye and Spider-cam operators deciding it was not worth it, Pakistan’s image took a hit.
Ironically, with every single step the PSL management announced in the domain of damage control, Pakistan’s image took a hit. If you think a five-tier box security matching the protocol for visiting presidents would have come across as an incentive to foreign eyes and ears, think again. It only underlined how fragile the situation is. The third-tier replacement list was a dampener; except for those who featured on the list. But it exposed the desperation which, naturally, added nothing to Pakistan’s image. Every time news came around to the effect that the PSL had ‘convinced’ someone — match referee, umpire et al — it was actually damaging to Pakistan’s image.
It was easy for all concerned to blame Imran Khan for politicising the issue — and the way politics works, he might as well have been doing that — but there is no running away from the reality of his argument. That the reality more often than not happens to be hard, harsh and horrid goes without saying. Every time this media outlet or that showed footage of masked gunmen on the ready and sniffer dogs roaming around, Pakistan’s image took a hit. Every time news was flashed or printed about areas being sealed off, gas supplies being disconnected, entry points being tightened, hospitals being put on alert and a temporary hospital being erected next door for 24 hours, Pakistan’s image took a hit. A metaphor would be in place. When you tell a patient he is going to be alright and simultaneously talk to some undertaker to be ready just in case something goes wrong, the patient knows he is in trouble regardless of all the glib-talk. The more we talked of being ready, the more scared the foreigners would have felt. They were not wrong.
And we should have done everything without shouting about it. There are discreet ways of handling such affairs, and one of them is to know when not to go public with your plans.
And, lest it be mistaken, media was not doing anything wrong either. It was just conveying information that the PCB-PSL-Punjab administration triumvirate was releasing directly or discreetly. And it is its professional business to report. So please hold your horses if you are about to unleash a lecture on ‘responsible media behaviour’ peppered with half-cooked, ill-informed and ill-intended examples from what is generally passed around as ‘round the world’. That is not part of the equation here. Period.
So, the foreigners were not wrong. The media was not wrong. The decision-makers were wrong all the way through. The match happened without making any point, but it carried the risks that could have pulled the plug completely. It was not a risk worth taking.
The number of hits Pakistan’s image thus took clearly outnumbered the hits smashed out of the park across the PSL. And the fact that it all happened in the name of nothing else except boosting Pakistan’s image is a textbook example of irony. Pure and simple irony. That there are people trying to score points out of it all is a textbook example of expediency. Pure and simple expediency.
That apart, all it did in terms of coverage was to take the sheen off the PSL because the latter half was consumed more by where the final would be held than what was happening on the field. And, just to stress the point, it is the media coverage that leads to either image-building or image-destruction or image sustenance. The first possibility was the only impossibility in the scenario. In the best case scenario, it could have sustained the image which is, as it happens, already negative. Or it could have added a layer to the image and made it even more negative. It was a lose-lose equation. Once the public euphoria dies, the reality will emerge. Just wait.
Published in Dawn, EOS, March 12th, 2017
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