Tilting at Windmills

JULY 1999 - I have just returned from a dinner hosted for the Pakistan cricket team by a company marketing international calling cards. It’s a pity I cannot name the company, but it won’t take too much intelligence to guess which one it is. The important thing is, it had the vision, the courage and the good taste to plan and hold this function in the first place. Hopefully, there will be others now. Given the witch-hunt frenzy which has enveloped the country since lunch time on 20th June 1999, this break is like a breath of fresh air.

The tastefully laid out dinner setting at one of Lahore’s leading hotels was a nice backdrop against which to welcome a large number of guests including former cricketers, journalists, former and present, and of course the players of the 1999 World Cup squad. The media was there in large numbers. Not surprisingly, this being the first formal function the team has been invited to. In a way I found it a trifle ironical since a large part of the blame for the hysteria that swept through the country was generated and fuelled in the first place by the very same media. So much hype had been projected about our invincibility by armies of petty pen pushers that when the fall came it was accompanied by wails of despair from one end of the country to the other. The team, a shadow of its full strength arrived singly and in twos, looking tentative, unsure and forlorn. There were no smiles, just wan exchanges and looks that betrayed the terrible strain they are going through. There was no buoyancy even when the packed hall cheered and clapped for them during the evening. Public censure is a frightening force and clearly it has hit the team smack in their faces. Of the eight in the country, six were present. Moin and Inzi were not. Neither was Mushtaq or Waqar. Intikhab Alam and Aftab Gul spoke, with passion and reason and called for an end to the madness that has erupted here. They were open in saying that the final was a poor performance by a side that had done so incredibly well, but this was part of the game and part of its great legacy. The better team won and that was that. Retired Chief Justice Nasim Hasan Shah, a fanatic cricket lover, rounded off with a plea for sanity and cash awards to the players.

Ever since the final, the response to the defeat has been a bigger disgrace than the defeat itself. It wasn’t the last cricket match in the history of mankind and not the first time a popular side went down without a fight. For a country which silently continues to watch the plunder of its wealth and the sale of its national honour by those who do not deserve to be where they are, the cricket over-reaction is indeed hard to understand. While mobs as a rule have no sense of balance, which is why they are mobs and not groups of intelligent people, what can explain the silence of the game’s great benefactors from the Prime Minister down ? What is the lesson we are handing out to the next generation ? That winning is all ? That losing is a disgrace ? That levelling unfounded charges is alright since you rarely have to prove them ? That it is a sin to praise a better performance if it is not yours ? These and many more unfortunate lessons have been sailing down from the heights of Islamabad where good sense, fair play and truth are veiled in a mist that refuses to lift.

But then it is silly to expect sane and rational behaviour from the leadership over cricket when it is happily prepared to surrender its principles (few that there may be) for a little more time in power. To many of us, the Prime Minister’s dash to the US is understandable but what defies all logic is that he thought it fit to throw in his family and friends for the jaunt and having had his knuckles rapped good and proper at Blair House and then shown the door, he then hits the shopping district in New York and spends two hours buying trinkets. Ye gods can anything be sadder ? In a way I suppose, it should be understandable because to expect anything else, like a four man delegation, an immediate return to Pakistan once the business had been transacted – whatever that business may have been and to do nothing else but what was the order of the day, would be foolish. The truth is that what we see is the reality; what we perceive things should be, are foolish notions. The cricket team is as much a victim of bad play as it is of this general behaviour that makes us look like stooges everywhere.

The truth is that no body really cares what the truth is. We are now the world champions in leaping before seeing and our world view is getting more and more warped day by day. In the mad scheme of things, we are unable to maintain any balance. Watching the proceedings tonight, I couldn’t stop wondering who are the real supporters of this game. Where are all those companies and sponsors who blew money on the World Cup like it was going out of circulation and are now prominent by their deafening silence. Was their support only confined to a Pakistan that notched up victories ? And now when the team needs their support most, they have vaporised into nothingness. It is this kind of attitude that puts us way down the ladder, claims notwithstanding. We have, last week pulled off another stunning victory. Kashmir has been ‘internationalised’ whatever that means. The only thing that has been internationalised is the Line of Control. Kashmir has been an international issue since 1948, so there have been no diplomatic victories up there. We have simply caved in and that is not a surprise when you remember that those who survive on alms are hardly ever in a position to call the shots. The mess we have made on the national scene need not be pushed into cricket as well. We have a young team that’s talented and unpredictable; what we need is to build it into a machine that brings in the laurels without which it seems, life has no meaning here. It can be done, unreasonable as the dream it is, but to win you must first learn to lose and it’s an advice the Prime Minister should be listening to.