Take a bow for bringing joy to a desperate nation
As our nerves settle and we move on, the thought that we were tantalisingly close to a World Cup trophy again is heartbreaking. This was the fifth such summit since 1992 when Imran Khan led his cornered tigers to a glory which our cricket-mad nation have since yearned for like water on the parched Thar desert. Circa 2011 probably, offered us the best chance given that we were on familiar territory subcontinent conditions although it would probably have been better still had the unfortunate terrorist attack not taken place on the visiting Sri Lankan team in Lahore two years ago.
Shahid Afridi and his merry band would have been much more wired and likely to have grasped Sachincredible dollies had the offering been made in Gaddafi Stadium, which would have been a real possibility had World Cup rights not been snatched from Pakistan. All that is now in the X-files of failures at the end of the Punjab government it was gross negligence and dereliction of duty that allowed the terrorists to do the unimaginable and the blunder land that is Pakistan Cricket Board under that walking disaster called Ijaz Butt.
However, nothing should detract us from raising a toast to Team Pakistan under Shahid Afridi for fighting against all odds to reach as far as the semifinals and bringing joy to a desperate nation when few gave us a sniff of even a quarterfinal berth. To begin to understand the scale of the achievement you have to keep in mind the circumstances under which Afridi emerged as Pakistans biggest glue, and for which this nation, owes him a debt of thankfulness.
Perhaps, the greatest disservice Ijaz Inept Butt did to Pakistan cricket was that he failed to intervene and take charge once the trio of Salman Butt, Mohammed Asif and Mohammed Aamer were implicated in spot-fixing. The PCB chief not only abdicated responsibility but also made highly irresponsible claims of match-fixing against the English team and unwarranted targeting of the ICC chief Haroon Lorgat, which not only deepened Pakistans isolation in the cricket comity but also adversely affected the trios case because it united forces inimical to Pakistans interests in the ICC.
To be sure, one is not defending the convicted players but surely, mitigating circumstances should have been considered in the case of at least the young and vulnerable Aamer, who may have succumbed to the kind of pressure, which even the most tenuous would have been tested to withstand. This could only have been possible if Butt had been alive to the shenanigans to weaken a resurgent Pakistani team the intriguing delay in the ICC tribunal hearing, which was held very close to the World Cup, certainly raised doubts.
But all this was nothing compared to how Butt fiddled with the unity of his own team by pitting Afridi against Misbahul-Haq in a Saddam-esque perversity to see who prevailed in an ODI series in New Zealand before announcing the captain for the World Cup less than a fortnight before the showpiece event. Contrast this ludicrous ill-planning with Pakistans only World Cup-winning captain Imran Khan, who famously said it took him one year to plan for the summit. Just last week, Sri Lankan skipper Kumar Sangakkara also said he had been planning for the last two years to make the cut in 2011 World Cup.
Given this backdrop, and the fact that senior pros like Younus Khan and Misbahul Haq refused to bat higher up the order and the wheels coming off in the case of Shoaib Akhtar and Kamran Akmal, it is amazing that Afridi managed to lift the spirit of his team and the nation. Of course, it helped that he led the exciting campaign with match-winning prowess. On the way to the semifinal, he not only saved his countrys blushes against an unfancied Canada but also trounced Sri Lanka in its own alley, put an end to Australias 11-year, 34-match unbeaten run in the games premier event and crushed the West Indies in a quarterfinal that was embarrassingly, lopsided.
But even before Afridi could lead the challenge against India, blundering Interior Minister Rehman Malik shocked the nation by issuing an anti-match-fixing advisory with caustic suggestions that he was keeping an eye on the activities of Afridis team. To his credit, Afridi chose to call a spade a spade, taking up Maliks questionable conduct with the Prime Minister and upon his return home warning the minister to mind his words all this in a country where it is never easy to take on officialdom.
The only people who outdid Afridis World Cup exploits are his compatriots back home, who not only have been remarkably poised and sporting but also profuse in their praise and welcome for the skipper and his team.
Team Pakistan more than deserves it.
The writer is a newspaper editor based in Islamabad. He can be reached at [email protected]
