A History of Pakistan Cricket :A Review

Osman Samiuddin's The Unquiet Ones: A History of Pakistan Cricket is a remarkable book about arguably the world's most confounding sporting culture. It is a chronological story, built episodically. The word 'unquiet' appears twice in the prologue, and never in the text itself. This is a pity, for rarely has a book about cricket been so wonderfully titled. What follows is a hopefully unquiet, but (perhaps mercifully for some of you) brief encounter with the book.

An unquiet exists when there are unrelenting, structural causes of friction. It exists when an amateur administration attempts to govern sportsmen whose skills are worthy of the most talented full-time professionals. It exists when the unreason of nationalism meets the cold, often subtle logic of cricket. It exists when a job is seen as a prize, and an investment is seen as a reward. Most of all it specifically exists when the arbitrary jingoism of theocracy meets bureaucratic absurdity of modernity. In most nations in the world today, each of these tensions exists in some measure. In Pakistan, they seem to have struck en masse, with a rare force that has to be seen to be believed.

The story of Pakistan cricket is the story of the sport of the college educated elite growing into the single greatest unifying edifice in the country. It begins in the days when a captain was chosen for having the appropriate background (which in those days meant having an elite private education in school, followed by a degree from Oxford or Cambridge) to the days of Inzamam-Ul-Haq, who was the very archetype of the venerable, feudal patriarch - heavy handed, devout, conservative - a leader by personal example (was there a more gifted batsman in his time?) and fatherly diktat. It is the story of the age of professionals trained in County Cricket who constituted Pakistan's finest cricketing era and the subsequent period when the county exposure declined and so did the quality of Pakistan's cricket. Samiuddin constructs these chronologies with a journalist's eye for detail and an anthropologist's capacity for synthesis. Published accounts from books and periodicals are skilfully interwoven with accounts from interviewees and the author's own reporting.

Sometimes, this leads to the perpetuation of myths. Take for example, the story of the largely mythical figure of the Pakistani fast bowler. Fazal, Sarfaraz, Imran, Wasim, Waqar and Shoaib. If Carl Linnaeus set out to classify cricketers, then under the kingdom of bowlers, each of these six master bowlers could easily headline different species. There was Fazal, the strictly medium paced metronomic master of cutters and matting. There was Sarfaraz with his wily seam and swing. Then there was the amphibious Imran. Wasim Akram was a left armer and merits a branch all to himself. Waqar was a creature of reverse-swing - his style tailor made for the doctored ball (as Samiuddin points out, is commonly acknowledged to have been the case in the 1980s and early 90s) - his extreme pace, full length and slingy action a triumph of natural selection. And then there was Shoaib, whose uniquely double jointed arm and extra-large heart would have left Linneaus in a wretched funk about the distinct possibility that this business of taxonomy was perhaps futile after all.

Yet, these are all stuffed in Pakistani cricketing folklore into the singular figure of the carefree, relentlessly attacking fast bowler. The Wasim Akram I remember was a much more subtle character. In an interview in the late 1990s, when, especially in ODI cricket, new ball bowlers kept running into marauding pinch hitting openers who batted in the first 15 overs as if run scoring was going out of fashion, I remember Akram explaining at length how he had developed the control to be able to contain batsmen. "Maar se bach jaata hoon." Just today, Ramiz Raja, a scion of one Pakistan's greatest cricketing families and a marginal figure in Samiuddin's account repeats the familiar lament about the loss of Pakistan's aggressive style, especially in the bowling.

The cricketing explanation is simple. Wasims and Waqars and Imrans do not emerge from an assembly line. Tape ball cricket does not produce them. A sophisticated combination of circumstances, good fortune and super human effort might, and only might, result in a Wasim Akram. It is no surprise that such superstars have emerged, even in Pakistan at the rate of about 1 per decade. If Fazal emerged in the 1950s, Imran did in the 1970s, Wasim in the 1980s, Waqar in 1990s, and Shoaib in the 2000s. Give or take a couple of years. At least one out of Mohammad Asif or Mohammad Amir might have gone on to command a spot next to these superstars, but then again, even without the tragedy of spot-fixing, they might not. What's more, ball-tampering is nearly impossible in the age of ICC referees, elite umpires and about 27 cameras following the ball throughout the day. International cricket has gone from a time when, as Samiuddin tells us, umpires turned a blind eye towards ball tampering, to a time when an elite umpire, acting entirely legally, decided to penalize Pakistan for tampering the ball based on what other experts suggest was guesswork. The days of the ball beginning to suddenly misbehave dramatically are long gone, in part because Pakistan's current bowlers are not even remotely in the same class as Wasim or Waqar, but also because of this improved vigilance. A couple of generations of batsmen have seen reverse swing and figured out ways to cope with it too. Its very hard to be "aggressive" when the ball doesn't do strange things in the air and off the wicket. If there is one issue I have with some of Samiuddin's arguments, it is that they are not sufficiently skeptical of the popular folklore when it comes to the nuts and bolts details of cricket. But perhaps that is the work of a critic. The historian's first role is to present the folklore, which Samiuddin does effortlessly.

It is the amateur obsession with nebulous things like "aggression" or "style" (and the necessary evasion of complicated reality which goes along with this) which are the cause of much of the unquiet in Pakistan cricket. In India, thanks to the financial muscle of the BCCI and the utterly cavalier attitude of India's players to towards the press, today elite Indian cricketers can safely ignore the kneejerk immediacy which seems to still be so influential in Pakistan. This has benefited India's cricketers no end. Do you remember the last time there was press reporting about "cliques" in the Indian side? There were some rumblings involving Dhoni and Sehwag. Whatever journalists may know privately, and whatever substantial disagreements there might have been among players (there are always some disagreements among players, in any team), the Indian team dealt the reports with barely disguised contempt.

The Unquiet Ones is, in one sense an argument about the origins of the extraordinary skill which Pakistani teams have produced with great regularity over the years, set against (and amidst) a relentless catalogue of high crimes, misdemeanors, squabbles and revolutions which have beset that land since 1947. In these 68 years, Pakistan has been split once, has seen one unsuccessful communist coup attempt and three successful military coups which resulted in dictatorships for a total of 33 years. It has had one Prime Minister assassinated, another executed. It has been an unfortunate frontline state in the Cold War and its more recent sibling, the War on Terror. In the latter, 20,289 civilians and 6138 security personnel have been killed since 2003 in Pakistan - over 2000 per year.

Cricket is a labor of love. Its memory has to be kept alive in such troubled times. Samiuddin chronicles the many selfless benefactors who spent their own money and perhaps far more important, countless hours of their lives, promoting the game in Pakistan. The history of cricket in the sub-continent has been made on the shoulders of these giants, especially in the big cities where it first took root. Samiuddin tells us of the history the involvement in cricket of the highest levels of Pakistan's Government - a feature which distinguishes the fate of cricket in India from the fate of the game in both Pakistan and Sri Lanka. At 484 pages, it is a long book. It is to Samiuddin's great credit, that one is left wishing that it was at least a couple of hundred pages longer.

But perhaps Samiuddin's greatest accomplishment is that he holds Pakistan cricket, which he so obviously seems to love, at a respectful distance without relinquishing, even for a moment, his wonderfully skeptical, compassionate eye which seems to miss little and ignores nothing. I enjoyed the book immensely and recommend it to anyone who thinks they are a cricket fan and of course, to anyone else who is blessed with the disease commonly known as curiosity. The Unquiet Ones, matches Roger's Kahn's classic The Boys of Summer in ambition as well as skill.
Kartikeya Date
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