From Peshawar to Kotli, from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on the North-Western Frontier, to Kashmir in the east on the contested border with India, the enduring love of Pakistan for cricket was clear. The game was being played on street corners, in car parking lots, on green fields, scrubland, on mountainsides, plains, in orchards and in villages, towns, and the great teeming cities of Lahore and Islamabad.
Soldiers sat in the cool night hours outside embassies, huddled next to stone fires, listening on the radio to the final of the Pakistan Super League. School children at Aitcheson College in Lahore, bewitched by the cricket they had seen in Dubai, wanted to know who would win the World T20. Restaurant owners and kitchen staff demanded selfies, gawping at this former international player as if he was from Mars.
Televisions everywhere were tuned to Dubai and the PSL: viewing figures were higher in Pakistan for the PSL final than for the 2015 World Cup equivalent- according to figures, over half of those who owned a television tuned in. There was a great sense of pride in the tournament, belonging as it does to Pakistan, and there remains a yearning for cricket, despite the absence of international players in Pakistan since the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team in 2009.
Richie Benaud said that the word ‘tragedy’ should have no place in the sporting lexicon, but Pakistan and cricket has been a tragic affair of late. Not just the absence of it, which has prevented Pakistanis from watching their national sport and their national heroes, and these same heroes from playing in front of friends and family, but the very real tragedy when the Sri Lankan team bus was attacked seven years ago, which sparked Pakistan’s isolation from the world game, when a number of civilians and policemen were killed and cricketers severely injured.
I stood in the middle of that roundabout last week where the attack took place, where bullets were sprayed at Trevor Bayliss, Paul Farbrace and others. With cars, motorcycles, buses and rickshaws whizzing past, and Lahore going about its daily business, it was hard to think of it as a place of death. In the near distance were the floodlights of the Gaddafi Stadium, near where a suicide bomber blew himself up at the outer security ring during Zimbabwe’s one-day return in May last year, the only international cricket in Pakistan since the Sri Lankan attack.
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That a policeman died that day and the bomber was prevented from getting closer to the stadium is cited as evidence, tragically, that the security arrangements that day worked.
“Pakistan and cricket has been a tragic affair of late”
To understand the importance of cricket to Pakistan, you have to remember that its sense of nationhood and international cricket are bound together. Pakistan’s first Test match took place just five years after the birth of the country. As the late journalist Omar Kureishi has written: “cricket was intertwined with the process of nation building. There were few things that Pakistan achieved as a new nation; cricketing success was one of the early bonds of nationhood.” As in the Caribbean, cricket is more than just a game.
So its absence has been heartfelt. Now, the first tentative steps are being taken to bring international cricket in some form back to the country again. During England’s tour of South Africa, Rory Steyn, a security advisor to the ICC and formerly Nelson Mandela’s bodyguard, was dispatched on a mission to produce a report on the possibilities for a World XI or Commonwealth XI playing a series of matches against Pakistan in Lahore and Islamabad this year, as a prelude to international teams returning thereafter.
That report is now complete and will be discussed during the World T20 by Giles Clarke, who heads what is called the Pakistan Task Force, and Dave Richardson, the chief-executive of the ICC. Recommendations will then be put to the ICC board during the spring meeting. Discussions for the cricket, security notwithstanding, are at an advanced stage, with coaches and players approached, some of whom have given a positive response despite the fact that all the foreign players in the PSL who were asked said they would be unwilling to travel to Pakistan.
Although security concerns have been obvious and cannot be understated, Pakistan does suffer from adverse perceptions beyond that. Peter Oborne’s magisterial history of Pakistan cricket begins with assertion that cricket writing about Pakistan has sometimes fallen into the wrong hands. “It has been carried out by people who do not like Pakistan, are suspicious of Pakistanis and have their own preconceptions. Autobiographies by England cricketers, with some exceptions, are blind to the beauty of Pakistan and to the warmth and generosity of its people.” That the world game is dominated by India has not helped, either.
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I spent last week in the company of Imran Khan, making a programme for Sky Sports ahead of Pakistan’s visit next summer. It was the first time I had been back in the country for 15 years, and I, too, had forgotten the warmth and generosity to which Oborne rightly refers. The drip, drip affect of bad news that emanates out of the country almost on a daily basis, and the western imprint put upon it, obscures other truths, too.
Another problem is that cricketers, if they returned, would invariably be in lock-down mode, seeing only hotel rooms, airport lounges and stadiums, with heavy security on hand, rather than being allowed to roam freely. For sure, we had heavy armed security in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Kashmir last week, but in Lahore and Islamabad we went around unhindered, taking a tuk-tuk for example one night in Lahore to dine in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Old Fort. It is unlikely that international cricketers would be allowed such freedoms and so they would have a warped and distorted view of the place and the risks involved.
Of course, there are risks and keen as Clarke is to push for a return of international cricket to Pakistan, he knows that certain conditions must be met. Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, needs to be on board, as do the intelligence and security services chiefs. The Pakistan Cricket Board will have to assume the risk, because other boards would be terrified about liability if anything happened to any of their players and the players and coaches themselves would need to assume some risk of their own.
Clarke is determined to succeed, although some in international cricket do not share his enthusiasm. It is unlikely that centrally-contracted England players would be given clearance even if they were keen to participate. Players, by and large, seek an easy life, but there may be enough of them with points to prove, with a broader vision to accept some degree of risk or simply keen for a well-paid job. If and when it happens, for cricket-starved Pakistanis it will be an occasion to savour.