Spectator sport

It was a sign of things to come. By day8217;s end, India won a keenly contested tie, and Shamsie says, 8220;I have never seen a Karachi audience so happy with a game they8217;d lost.8221;

It was a sign that 8220;something has shifted8221; 8212; in the way Indians and Pakistanis wanted to interact with each other.

Cricket has, it can be argued, been the arena in which so many of the major issues in Pakistan have played out. Today, the combined toll of a shock exit from the World Cup and Bob Woolmer8217;s death is reflected in the departure of captain, chairman and selectors 8212; and the institutional crisis coincides with street protests in Pakistan8217;s cities over the sacking of the chief justice. To make a parallel would be facile. Cricket is just a game. But it does provide clues to institutional weaknesses and the problems that accrue with 8220;authoritarian leadership and patronage of cricket8221;.

While reporting on India8217;s tour of Pakistan that spring of 2004, one could find in the local media hints that something 8212; to re-use Shamsie8217;s phrase 8212; was shifting. Remember, Dina Wadia, only and estranged daughter of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had just visited Lahore for one of the one-dayers. Hotels in Lahore and Islamabad were filling up with tourists and media crews covering something other than war in Afghanistan and extremism. In stark contrast to the travel advisories that came after a blast outside the team hotel prompted the visiting New Zealand team to abandon the series in May 2002.

The desire for interaction had always been there, noted Karachi-based journalist Beena Sarwar, no regime can command its citizens to embrace visitors. 8220;I think the Pakistanis are eager to show that they are not as black as the western and possibly Indian media has been painting them,8221; she said, 8220;that they are normal, fun-loving people, who are not fundamentalist 8212; in the extremist, militant sense 8212; and they welcomed the opportunity to prove this.8221;

Mushahid Hussain, a former federal minister, wrote in a column: 8220;These cricket matches brought out the best among the Pakistani people. If the cricket series may have greatly helped to remove some of the stereotypes held among Indians regarding Pakistanis, the cricket matches were uplifting from the point of view of Pakistanis8217; self-image as well since these debunked the portrait of Pakistan and Pakistanis often portrayed by a 8216;cribbing culture8217; that always sees the glass as half empty.8221;

By all indicators, by tour8217;s end, the isolation that came with military rule, evidence of the post 9/11 blowback, and a military standoff with India was history.

A year later, in the summer of 2005, a twentysomething advertising executive would articulate the intense effort spectators made to pull off the transformation at the cricket stadium. 8220;I was at the two one-day matches in Lahore last year,8221; Aaliya recalled over an after-dinner ice cream in Islamabad. I had fun, she said, but I just did not have the energy to concentrate on the cricket. We were making such an effort to keep up the cheer, to welcome visitors from India, that we didn8217;t even notice that Pakistan had lost.

By then, officials at the Indian High Commission would count the collateral benefits through the ad-hoc conscription of their spouses to handle the thousand-fold increase in issuance of visas.

Cricket in Pakistan does not draw anywhere near the kind of spectators and sponsors it does in India. The Pakistan Cricket Board also does not have the kind of clout and autonomy the Board of Control for Cricket in India enjoys. But the relative lack of organisation and facilities brings unexpected 8212; though, as many would argue, in no way proportionate 8212; advantages in terms of the brute flamboyance and raw talent.

In an essay 8216;Pakistan: identity and tradition8217;, Australian sports historian Chris Valiotis points out: 8220;The demise of traditional grass-roots cricket, along with a lack of infrastructure, sustainable coaching programmes, and a domestic competition that has historically encountered numerous organisational and financial problems, has meant that vernacular cricketers from poorer backgrounds are given little opportunity or incentive to alter the playing skills of 8216;informal8217; village and urban cricket. The sudden rise from obscurity that many of them make 8212; an outcome of traditional patronage patterns where senior players with some authority are free to select and recruit payers of their choice 8212; has given rise to a distinct Pakistani style of cricket that challenges the traditional norms of international cricket. This style of cricket is risqueacute; and flamboyant.8221;

It is not a coincidence cricketers who have graduated from tape-ball cricket have perfected the skill of reverse swing. Or that it was Imran Khan, with the immense self-belief reinforced by his lineage, who took an untested Inzamam-ul-Haq to the World Cup in Australia in 1992.

There are many more where

Inzamam and the now benched Shoaib Akhtar came from.

Pakistan cricket8217;s challenge is to somehow professionalise this raw talent, without stifling it.