If it surprises, it must be Pakistan

Peter Oborne takes on established experts on South Asian cricket in an entertaining new book chronicling the history of cricket in Pakistan

WOUNDED TIGER
Author: Peter Oborne
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 624
Price: Rs 699

In the late 1950s, during the long, hot and dusty summer afternoons of Delhi, my elder brother and I used to play a dice game called 'Indoor Cricket'. It had a board and tiny plastic men who could be placed as fielders, bowler and batsmen. Their names were printed on the base on which they stood.

The two teams were India and Pakistan. My brother, exercising the customary pre-empting rights of elder brothers, was always India. I was always Pakistan. That's how I got to memorise the names of the Pakistani team in the 1950s.

Fazal Mahmood, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, Hanif Mohammad, Mushtaq Mohammad, Saeed Ahmed, Imtiaz Ahmed, Haseeb Ahsan are the seven names I can recall now. Towards the end of 1960 all of them (except Kardar) came to India for a 5-Test series. Our father took us to the last match at Ferozshah Kotla in February 1961 - all five days, no school - where I watched 'my team' play. That match, like the rest, was drawn.

Those guys from so long ago come alive in this very large book, as indeed do the rest of the players who have played for Pakistan over the past 60 years. This is chiefly because Peter Oborne has written a very comprehensive and readable account of the growth and decline of Pakistan cricket.

He has also pooh-poohed Ramchandra Guha, who is considered a leading cricket historian, and the dilettante Shashi Tharoor. And, he has done it, with devastating evidence and unconcealed spite, in the preface itself. Both, he shows, have been careless with their facts. So the next time you read these guys do keep some salt handy.

Oborne's starting premise is likely to be music to Pakistani ears: the world has not been fair to Pakistan cricket. Non-Pakistani writers, he says, have started with the assumption that Pakistan cricket is always unruly and increasingly dishonest.

The evidence on the ground, so to speak, certainly suggests as much. But Oborne has written such a sympathetic account that it is hard not to break out in sobs.

The Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan (BCCP) was formed just a year after the British, with their traditional meanness towards India, created Pakistan in August 1947. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) opposed the idea but there was precious little it could do about it.

Towards the end of that year, the West Indies were touring India and decided to break their tour with a Test in Pakistan. This gave BCCP some legitimacy. If Britain prompted them, Oborne doesn't say so.

Lala Amarnath was India captain and encouraged the West Indies to go to Lahore. He told them the level was that of a schoolboy team. The Pakistanis were enraged. That rage seems to have persisted, not just against India but towards the rest of the world too.

Through the 1950s, Kardar, as BCCP resident, overcoming huge odds, built up Pakistan cricket into a formidable force. But aside from some stray wins, it took Pakistan, like India, a quarter of a century to catch up with England and Australia. Catching up with the West Indies would take another 20 years when Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram blossomed with their reverse swing.

And thereby hangs a tale. Pakistan had always had bowlers who could bowl fast. But they had mostly relied on accuracy. It was not until Sarfraz Nawaz discovered the reverse swing in the late 1960s that some guile crept into the bowling.

Oborne says that Sarfraz told him that at first he refused to share his secret - shining the ball on one side - with his bowling partner Imran Khan. In fact, says Osborne, Sarfraz went to the extent of roughing up the ball on both sides on the last ball of his over so that Imran would not be able to get wickets!

Although Oborne tries hard to put a gloss on it, that sort of low cunning has persisted as a major characteristic of Pakistan cricket. One manifestation of this, as the non-Punjabi Indian cricketers will tell you, is the hurling of the standard ma-behn abuse at Indian batsmen.

Once, in 1994, when Aaqib Javed abused him after every ball he bowled to him, Sachin Tendulkar quietly asked him "Aap itni galiyaan kyun detein hain?" (Why are you abusing me so much?) Taken aback by the 'aap', Javed is on record as saying that after that he never abused Tendulkar again. Others, though, were fair game.

It was thus a no-holds barred approach for the Pakistanis. It worked well as long as they were playing for the country. But when the bookies started taking an interest from around 1980, that same approach has become a huge millstone around Pakistan cricket's neck.

Oborne, sadly, while blaming the cricketers for being such losers, skims the surface of this issue. His overall effort is to show that Pakistan has been more sinned against than sinned. He keeps reminding the reader about Mohammad Azharuddin and Hansie Cronje and some others. But the degree and extent of corruption in India's (or any other country's) cricket can't be compared to what there is in Pakistan. As in so many other cases, Pakistan is unique in this respect as well. It is a bit like Pakistan claiming to be a victim of terrorism.

Not being a South Asian, Oborne has not quite managed to get inside the heads of the Pakistanis. South Asians have no particular sense of the collective or team. Europe got the enlightenment that gave the individual primacy; in South Asia we have always been like that only.

The result is inconsistency, erratic behaviour, the most amazing individual brilliance and a supreme commitment to self and self alone. Thanks to BCCP's foolishness, Pakistani cricketers are extreme examples of all these things.

The book would have been richer if it had had more of the Sarfraz-like anecdotes and some thumbnail sketches of the great players like Inzy. It is a pity that it doesn't. Nevertheless, it is a great read. The 600 odd pages just flit by.

Buy it. Try it.