As important as the talent that players such as Wasim Akram and Younis had was the faith Khan had in their talent and in himself in harnessing it. -Photo by Reuters Taken aback and also delighted, Khan wondered to Mudassar Nazar who this kid was, confident enough to set his own fields. After the game, Khan told Javed that even if he couldn’t get him on the winter tour to Australia, he should consider himself a part of the side.
There was never any doubt Javed would not be taken along, and in one of his very first games (a one-day international at Adelaide Oval, Australia, on December 10, 1988), the contagion of Khan took hold. Vivian Richards came out to bat. Javed was bowling. “Maaro …[expletive deleted]… ko bouncer” (Bowl him a bouncer), Khan told him. Javed was shocked. A 16-year-old newbie bowling to one of the greatest batsmen to have lived with a hook that was as much a weapon as the bouncer itself? He did, surprising Richards in the process. “But then, I began to think like a lion and thought, I’ll bowl another to him,” Javed remembers. “When I did again, he hit me for four but that was a lesson for me. That was how Imran developed players. He would turn ordinary people into stars overnight, showing them such things, such dreams, such positives, that in one or two months people’s beliefs and thinking would change entirely.”
In the decade after Khan left, Pakistan maintained faith with his ways — twenty teenagers debuted between 1992 and 2002. Yet, unlike the batch from the previous decade, only a handful – if any at all – came close to realising the potential that brought them to attention in the first place. Quite the opposite, in fact: Imran Nazir, Hasan Raza, Shoaib Malik were all poster boys for a generation unfulfilled (if we are being strict, we could throw in Abdul Razzaq and even Shahid Afridi in that list; Mohammad Zahid is another, though he had just turned 20 when he debuted).
Talent does not overnight become greatness. Science, art, sweat, fortune and alchemy go into it. But in contrasting the fortunes of Khan’s boys against those who followed is to discover at least one undeniable element. As important as the talent that players such as Wasim Akram and Younis had was the faith Khan had in their talent and in himself in harnessing it. Of the many things players such as Malik or Raza missed, one was a figure who believed in them even more than they believed in themselves — a belief that could carry them through. It wasn’t the only thing, but it was a crucial one.
One way of appreciating what Kardar and Khan propagated is to see it as a fleeting subversion in a country where, broadly, there exists a rigid adherence to age-based hierarchy. To have faith in callow, breakable youth goes instinctively against the grain in a land where not just respect and preference to those older but also deference is so entrenched as to be stagnating. As a cursory but relevant aside, take the experience of young Pakistani captains: Permanently encircled by a group of disgruntled, conspiring seniors, they are doomed to, and do, always fail. In family life, this may be admirable – maybe – but in institutions and organisations it is counter-productive. A senior employee or player believes that it his right to prosper ahead of younger men, even those who have more aptitude for the job. Reward is for longevity, not merit or productivity. If the younger one does get ahead, fogies are, at once, in motion trying to bring down the upstart. Bob Woolmer saw it and tried, unsuccessfully, to make the captain Inzamamul Haq more accessible and open – a dad, not a father – to younger players.
So, in this last, troubled decade, the subversion has been gradually muted. Only twelve teenagers have debuted for Pakistan since the start of 2002. The last, great pronouncement of belief in the virtues of youth came in 2003, with Aamer Sohail’s wholesale culling of Pakistan’s senior players after the World Cup. Over the last three years, under the captaincy of Misbah-ul-Haq in particular, the Test squad is widely acknowledged to be the least young Pakistan has fielded.