Cricket World Cup 2015: Team Pakistan broke my heart
Watching Pakistan cricket team play the quarterfinal of the 2015 World Cup in Adelaide, on March 20, against Australia, was an exercise in many things, most of them unpleasant. As expected, the Aussies batted, bowled and fielded the team in green out of the World Cup, and thus began a noisy and suitably incensed round of debates, finger-pointing and blame-shifting. Oh the agony of watching your national team make a sporting ass of themselves in an international tournament…
Cricket, the gentlemanly sport, was a huge part of my awkwardly unfeminine, sassily tomboyish, wildly sporty childhood, and many a long afternoon was spent (happily) running between makeshift wickets, bowling with a tennis ball, and catching the shots on boundary (also makeshift). In a house full of ten children (the joy and sorrow of being a part of a joint family system), in an age when TV had one PTV, computers were a dream from Space Odyssey, and books were the quiet refuge, love for sports was, sort of, a given. Some with rules that didn't exist outside our big courtyard and bigger lawn, sporting activities formed a big part of my existence when cricket was played in white, and Imran Khan was the heartthrob (oh well, he still is, age, politics and two marriages withstanding).
Baseball, hockey, football, basketball, volleyball, badminton. Hopscotch, Kho Kho, kite-flying, marbles-playing. Monopoly, Ludo, carom, cards. We played 'em all, in all moments we could find pre-assembly in school, between classes, in free periods, between meals, after dark. No surprise that even today when life's confined to mostly four walls of one's room, key-punching on one's mobile phone/laptop, reading autobiographies, and books on the audacity of American misadventures globally, watching meth cooks in Breaking Bad and favourite characters being killed in Game of thrones, and heartache that dims with time, sports still evoke a response that is fond and exhilarating. Watching cricket has become a rare occurrence, but strong is the response it elicits. More so, when the team's in green, and the tournament has Asian, Champion, T20, or World Cup in the title, and the performance flakier than snowfall on a light winter day in Nathiagali.
Game after game, one watches one's team stumble, grumble, flounder and squander balls that oughta be hit hard, runs that oughta be made quicker than Shehzad's selfie-taking (anytime, anywhere), fours and sixes that are wild and exciting (and like all wild and exciting things not very long-lasting), and catches that oughta be taken with hands opening and clasping at the right time, like the valves after a bypass surgery. Fine, I'm being melodramatic. Man, it's painful to watch one's national team go into a World Cup, and play like the mohalla team. You know the one where the studs and the hunks and the jocks (at least in their half-length mirror-estimation) assemble after flicking half-smoked cigarettes, cussing louder than an RGV villain, to play cricket, hoping to be talent-scouted like in one of those feel-good dude-flicks where raw potential is spotted by the shrewd sports agent, or a has-been star.
Back to the team. It's cringe-worthy that even our cricket legends boast about the "unpredictability" of our national team. Change the few names here and there, and viola, the unpredictable team is right there, in all its inglorious non-glory. There's the supremely gifted Saeed Ajmal who takes wickets faster than Shahid Afridi on a supersonic selfie-taking day. But he's not in the CWC-2015, something about his arm moving the way it oughtn't. Presumably, the ICC decided to ban him after heaping cricketing laurels on him for years.
Hafeez and Younis are also MIA; I plan to have a long talk with Najam Sethi, the head of the PCB, when I see him next at some social do. Oh wait. The PCB head is Sheheryar Khan. Or is it XYZ? LMNO? Either I suffer from early Alzheimer's or the PCB head changes faster than Narendra Modi changing perfectly-stitched-starched-accessorised kurtas on a hug-Obama day. Now until I remember who heads the PCB circa today, I think it's wise to just skip to the match that made me $#@%&$ - nah, not the team - but my decision to watch the match.
Despite being unreasonably optimistic, mostly, there was not the slightest delusion of victory in my mind before the Pakistan-Australia match on that fateful Friday in that beautiful Adelaide ground in that far away Australia. And there he was, millions of eyes fixed on him - of all colours and intentions - in all cricket-watching countries. Or wherever there're Pakistanis, or their good-friends-away-from-Pakistan-India: the NRIs. The one-man batting squad of Misbah-ul-Haq, the much admired Pakistan team captain. Imagine the pressure on him. The king of "tuk-tuk" - a gift in test cricket - was forced to strengthen the batting in all the 2015 World Cup matches. He plays cautiously, just the way any sensible batsman would when the wickets fall early, the scoreboard in in abysmal double digits and the opponent is that almost immaculate, that almost perfect, that almost indefatigable team: Australia. An audible groan is heard throughout Pakistan when Misbah head backs to the pavilion amidst a huge ovation. And then starts the game of dominoes. O the shame of that.
The swaggering Afridi, the talented but unreliable Akmal, the underdog Sarfaraz (of Sarfaraz-dhoka-nahin-dayega fame), and the guys whose names I keep forgetting in my determination to free my mind of the match from hell. Expected was the defeat, but never in my most cynical moments I imagined Afridi pulling an Afridi: swing the bat a few times to hit three fours, one six, and then be caught for a seen-many-times-before shot. Actually, I tweeted he would do exactly that. Your irresponsible batting is one big billboard (Remember billboards? Of your avatar of being Pakistan's top male model?) of PCB's shoddy performance.
Ah, that Wahab. The magnificent bowler whose performance was a throwback to the splendour of our legends of fast bowling: Imran, Wasim, Waqar and Shoaib. One of the best bowling spells seen in years, Wahab stunned and wowed millions of cricket fans, notwithstanding his dismay at seeing two dropped catches, and 50 per cent match fee he lost. Stay, beautiful, Wahab, we love ya.
Don't even get me started on those two dropped catches. I reiterate: our team's catching abilities…suck. More than anything that sucks much. A ball that lands right in your hands, Rahat and Sohail, is meant to be clasped, not slip through fingers like rays of sunlight through clouds on an overcast day.
The two catches wouldn't have been that huge a deal had Pakistan scored, you know, more than…213. Yep. You score 213 against Australia, and you expect to bowl them all out…now if only real life was Lagaan, and the Aussies were the British whose a** you wished to kick off the pitch and out of the subcontinent. Rare is the sight of Pakistan players running between wickets to take, commonly known as, singles and doubles. Either the men in green treat the batting position as the la-Z-Boy in their living room back home, or the seat of the Ferrari they wish to own some day. Let's just not hit the ball. Or hit it straight across the boundary, or into the hands of a Watson, Maxwell, or Smith. Kaam khatm.
Pardon my disjointed writing. But if our cricket team is allowed to make a spectacle of themselves in their biggest game in four years, I'm merely a lazy, stay-at-home mom, on a slightly cloudy Sunday, still half-asleep, writing on a subject I may not know much about, but cherishing my childhood love for cricket I had to say it. In so many words when the only words that come to my mind thinking about that debacle of a quarterfinal are: seriously, Pakistan?