THE SHEER JOY OF SEEING PAKISTAN RULE THE WORLD
Taliban suspend hostilities, tribesmen huddle round a TV…
VERY RARELY has global sport experienced an upset like Pakistan’s amazing victory over bitter rivals India on Sunday.
The brilliant Indians were outand-out favourites. The chances of Pakistan, who only just scraped into the tournament and were ranked eighth out of eight qualifiers, had been written off by most if not all. The BBC were particularly contemptuous.
‘Pakistan are usually good for an upset, but not this time,’ said Test
Match Special’s Phil Tufnell, who added they would be ‘outclassed in every department’.
Then the magic happened. Out of the depths of despair and humiliation, greatness emerged.
We shouldn’t have been surprised. Pakistan’s triumph reminded me vividly of the 1992 World Cup. Back then Pakistan looked finished.
Then Imran Khan called his troops together and famously urged them to fight like ‘cornered tigers’. The rest is history and Pakistan blasted away England, with Graham Gooch and Ian Botham, in the final.
But Sunday’s victory was even sweeter. Imran’s team contained world- class players. Apart from the skipper, it had Javed Miandad, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed and the incomparable Wasim Akram. This Pakistan team pulled together by captain Sarfraz Ahmed was full of unknowns.
The opener Fakhar Zaman had hardly played an international game, having quit the Pakistan navy to play cricket. Shadab Khan, the leg-spinning hero, is just 18.
Pakistan pluck their cricketing geniuses almost from nowhere. Drive down a street in the commercial capital, Karachi, and you find yourself weaving your way between improvised matches featuring cricket fanatics. Travel to the mountains of the north and every patch of flat land has been colonised by young cricketers.
As someone who loves Pakistan and adores the country, I can testify to the raw quality and enthusiasm you find everywhere. It used to be said if you wanted to find an English fast bowler, you whistled down a mine shaft. In Pakistan there’s a cricketing genius lurking in every remote village.
Take the story of Mohammad Amir, the brilliant fast bowler whose matchwinning opening spell took out the top three in the Indian batting order, including captain Virat Kohli.
Aged 19, Amir was caught deliberately bowling no-balls in the spot-fixing scandal of 2010. He was jailed and then faced five years of exile from all forms of cricket.
I travelled with the young man to his home village near Rawalpindi and he told me of his deep contrition. now he has destroyed Pakistan’s greatest rivals.
This team has come from nowhere. Look at the bowling attack. not one of them has taken more than 100 Test wickets. The tournament star, the chestthumping Hasan Ali, had played one Test and a handful of one-day games. But together these largely unknown bowlers produced a superbly disciplined performance.
In the semi-final they strangled England, regarded by many as the best one-day team in the world.
This triumph is especially pleasing because Pakistan cricket has suffered so much in recent years. The Test team have been unable to play at home since a terrifying terrorist attack on the visiting Sri Lankan team in 2009. They play their ‘home’ matches in beautiful but bleak stadiums in the UAE, with almost no supporters.
Their cricket administration has often been in turmoil. In one year, it changed hands four times because of legal and political wrangles.
The team have overcome problems, particularly corruption, crime and terrorist threats, which established teams like England and Australia can barely imagine. The team was on the verge of collapsing altogether seven or eight years ago. That would have been a disaster for world cricket. For all its difficulties Pakistan have brought enormous joy to cricket lovers everywhere.
My own special hero is Abdul Qadir, the charming genius who reinvented the art of leg spin when he bamboozled England’s batsmen 40 years ago.
PAKISTAN have also brought us figures like the stately Imran, who went on to be a formidable politician. In recent times, Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan gave Pakistan joy on the field and moral leadership off it.
Let’s have a word for Pakistan’s green-clad supporters. With their cries of ‘Pakistan Zindabad!’ they bring such excitement and commitment to the game. Without exception they gloriously fail the test set by politician norman Tebbit who insisted that immigrants should support their host country — England — and not the land of their birth.
As for the cricket fans back in Pakistan, they bring an entirely new dimension to world cricket.
Yesterday the photographer Rahat Shinwari published a photograph of tribesmen watching the final in the mountains beyond Peshawar in the north west frontier. There were approximately 40 of them surrounding the TV, powered by a car battery because there is no electricity.
Even hardened Taliban fighters suspend hostilities for the day when Pakistan play cricket and celebrate by firing guns into the air when their national team win.
The celebrations in Indian-occupied Kashmir yesterday were tumultuous. In the Gulf states such as Bahrain and Dubai, huge parties followed the triumph. There is a shortage of good news in Pakistan, but yesterday the whole nation came together and threw a party, with the front pages of the newspapers dominated by the story. Cricket is a national obsession and the nation keeps throwing up cricketing prodigies capable of taking the world by surprise.
The victory will have special savour because India were the losers. The cricket rivalry dates back to a hard-fought Test series in 1952, not long after independence. So much is at stake in these contests that the two teams fought out a series of 13 consecuttive draws, including the first ever 0-0 five-Test series.
There was no cricket played between Pakistan and India from 1961 to 1978, a period when the two went to war twice. Renewed tensions mean Pakistan have not played a bilateral series against India since 2009. This has caused great damage to Pakistan’s cricket finances. The Indian players are not to blame and captain Kohli won many Pakistan hearts with his gracious speech in defeat.
I am a loyal and passionate English cricket supporter. Yet I love Pakistan as well. They bring something unique to world sport. They have produced some of the greatest moments in sporting history, and Sunday was a vivid example of the joy Pakistan bring to sports lovers around the globe.