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Hail the Unbelievables! How Pakistan found cricketing redemption
With their win over India at the Oval on Sunday, the Pakistan cricket team wrote another chapter in their long, twisting stor
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Kamila Shamsie
Monday 19 June 2017 17.08 BSTLast modified on Monday 19 June 2017 17.10 BST
For a story to successfully attach itself to a sports team over a number of decades while players and personnel change, while the game itself changes, while the world changes, it has to be flexible as well as meaningful and distinct. In the case of cricket, no team has a more oft-invoked story than the Pakistan national side. In the three decades I’ve been pinning my emotional wellbeing to the fortunes of the Pakistan cricket team, they have always been a group of men about whom you say: “They can win this, but it’s quite likely they won’t,” and equally: “They can’t win this, but it’s possible they will.” The Unpredictables. The Mercurials. The Never-Count-Them-Outs. But although this story has been shaping itself since the 80s, it became cast in stone 25 years ago, when Imran Khan’s team started their World Cup campaign in the most startlingly dismal manner, relying on a win against cricket-minnows Zimbabwe and a rain-enforced draw with England to get them past the initial stages of the tournament, and then went on to win five matches in a row and lift the cup.
That victory has been much invoked since Pakistan won the Champions Trophy at the Oval on Sunday, after starting the tournament being so crushed by India that they walked off the field looking more like pulp than men. But parallels only go so far. The 1992 Pakistan team was expected to perform well; the real surprise was that they stumbled so badly before picking themselves up and showing their well-recognised worth, and then some. The Pakistan team of 2017 couldn’t have looked more dissimilar. They entered the tournament ranked eighth out of eight; the captain was newly appointed; most of the players young and unknown. And then there were the players who weren’t in the squad because they were being investigated for corruption; and the hugely talented bowler Mohammad Amir, who was trying to find redemption after having been found guilty of spot-fixing and banned for five years, but whose team-mates had been consistently dropping catches off his bowling since his return to the international game; and the largest and most heartbreaking story of all, which is the team’s inability to play any games in Pakistan since the 2009 terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, which has deprived the players of the emotional and psychological strength that comes from playing on home ground. Things were so bad that all the Pakistan supporters I spoke to had lost faith in the story. Before the opening match, Pakistan supporters weren’t praying for victory; that was too outlandish a prospect. Instead, they were praying for rain.
Pakistan players celebrate victory at the Oval. Photograph: Matthew Impey/REX/Shutterstock
Rain did come, but not enough to prevent a match from being completed. And so to start the tournament, Pakistan did what Pakistan so often do: they didn’t just fail, they did so calamitously. And then to end the tournament, Pakistan did what Pakistan so often do: they didn’t just win, they did so extraordinarily. All this fits that story of the Mercurials. But that isn’t the whole story, because both that calamitous start and that extraordinary finish were against India.
The Indo-Pak cricketing rivalry is inevitable, given the unceasing political tensions between the two countries. But in the past few years that rivalry has intensified and become increasingly mean-spirited, even though – or rather, precisely because – the teams hardly ever play each other. In the past 10 years there have been only two bilateral one-day series between India and Pakistan; the last Test series was in 2007. This is not for cricketing reasons, but because of the Indian government’s interventions. Days before the start of the Champions Trophy, India’s sports minister announced that while India and Pakistan might meet in international tournaments, there was no question of any bilateral series between the two sides because “cricket and terrorism can’t go hand in hand”, reiterating an already-held official position. This sort of rhetoric poisons the air, and the long gaps between games mean that each encounter between the two sides carries far more weight than it should. Lately, though, India has been so dominant over Pakistan in international tournaments – particularly in the most important matches – that the story of Mercurial Pakistan has rarely been evident. Predictably, Losing Pakistan has been closer to the truth of it. Hence, the prayers for rain before that first game at Edgbaston.
And yet, no one was praying for rain before the final at the Oval. Something happened to the Pakistan cricket team after that initial loss against India. The new players drafted into the side to replace
burst into glory; the Fallen Angel that is Amir rose and helped pull his team up to victory – as a bowler and a batsmen; and the new captain grew into his role with every match. The victory against South Africa might have been helped along by the weather (rain shortened the game, and made it unnecessary for Pakistan’s fragile-looking batting side to last 50 overs in the field); the victory against Sri Lanka was certainly helped along by the opposition’s inexplicable awfulness on the day; but the victory against the tournament favourites, England, was about Pakistan outplaying their opponents in every aspect of the game. Just like that, an India-Pakistan final was on the cards, and so was something else that had been missing before that Edgbaston game: hope. Just a glimmer, no more, but even so.
I was there, at the Oval. I was there not because I had thought to buy a ticket – like so many Pakistani supporters, I had lost faith in the story and was sure Pakistan wouldn’t be playing. But an English friend had a pair of tickets and his team wasn’t in the final, so he gave them to my sister and me. I went in with that glimmer of hope, but also much trepidation – not only about the game but about the crowd. The stakes were so high, the sun so strong, the political baggage so heavy. Surely, it would take only the tiniest thing to make tempers fray. But then the two teams walked out side by side, no hostility in their body language and even some smiles between them. Everyone stood up and applauded. The Indian national anthem played. The Pakistani supporters remained standing. The Pakistani national anthem played. The Indian supporters remained standing. And right then I knew the crowd would be fine. It would be a replay of Karachi 2004, when the Indian side started its first full tour of Pakistan since 1990, and the only mood in the stands was of friendliness and good humour. But when Pakistan ended their innings with 338 runs, I also remembered that, in that Karachi match, India had scored 344 to win an incredibly close match. So, when the India innings started and Amir took a wicket with the third delivery, it was hard not to have the jubilation mixed with the terror of knowing that the brilliant Indian captain, Virat Kohli, was going to walk out to the middle. In Amir’s next over, when Azhar Ali dropped a straightforward catch to give the captain another life, I thought, here we are, this is it, bad old Pakistan back again. But then the unthinkable happened – with the very next delivery, Kohli edged the ball to the new boy Shadab Khan, who held on to it, and the captain was gone. India were 6-2. Despite the heroics of Hardik Pandya with the bat, India never looked likely to win it from that point on, although I can only say this in retrospect. While the match was still on, I kept remembering hope’s propensity, in the life of a Pakistan cricket fan, for making sudden exits just when you think it has come to stay. But hope wasn’t teasing this time. Pakistan won by 180 runs.
When the match ended, Kohli was both generous and gracious in defeat, which added to the feeling that we were in a parallel universe – one in which the sun shone on English fields, Pakistan played brilliantly, Indian and Pakistani supporters joked around with each other, and Kohli won Pakistani hearts. It would be nice to take things even further. It would be nice to say that cricket can transform Indo-Pak relations. It can’t do that. But at its best, it can afford a place of respite from the hostility; it can bring us into stands together bantering in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, English; it can make us want to see our teams play together more often, and not for the ugly reasons of wanting to crush the other, but for the joy of the sport that we love so passionately on both sides of the border.
Wasim Akram of Pakistan appeals for the wicket of England’s Derek Pringle during the final of the Cricket World Cup in Melbourne, 1992. Photograph: Ben Radford/Getty Images
When the trophy was lifted, the ceremony over, the Pakistan team made a lap of honour around the Oval pitch. They were laughing and smiling, raising the trophy in the direction of their supporters, running on legs that seemed fresh despite the hours playing in temperatures that were the same that day in London as in Karachi. All but one of them. As the team ran past the area in which I was standing I noticed a man walking slowly behind. It was the captain, Sarfraz Ahmed.Pakistan’s bowling coach, the former international player Azhar Mahmood, was walking alongside and had an arm around the younger man’s shoulder, talking to him. Sarfraz nodded once or twice but didn’t say anything. He ran a hand over his face, his expression one of disbelief. Then he looked ahead and saw how far he had become separated from his boys, and scampered to catch up with them. Forget the Mercurials and the Unpredictables. At the Oval on Sunday, his team were the Unbelievables.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...bles-how-pakistan-found-cricketing-redemption
