It’s only a game

Confession time. Cricket has never moved me. Ever. It was the summer sport at school. Loathed it. All that silly-mid-off nonsense. Rugby was an entirely different matter and I happily cantered around a muddy pitch during the winter months. Post-school cricket faded even further into the background as did sport generally at a participatory level; an exception being cycling where I bashed my bikes over continents for years and rode as a veteran in Audax events. Still no cricket. Then there was Pakistan.

As with all marriages that reach across a divide there has to be an element, sometimes several elements — of compromise. The Missus had never heard of rugby never mind watched a game thereof and was distinctly unimpressed when she first did. Very messy she thought. Bit like fighting. But she did buy me a rugby video for Christmas the year England won the World Cup. The rugby World Cup that is. And yes, up there in our fastness in Northern Areas there was quite a lot of cricket, both on TV and on wildly impossible pitches on the sides of mountains. And no, I never grew to love it but instead became immunised, developed a cricket tolerance that meant I did not break out into a whole-body rash at the first mention of a dot-ball over. Or square legs for that matter. This state of affairs has maintained equilibrium for 20-odd years — and then along comes the PSL final in Lahore.

It is not for me to make any comment on the quality of the match or the players on either side because I know damn-all about either. But I can legitimately comment on the atmosphere, the sense of Something Big that came across my household, my neighbourhood and the wider city that I live in. Bahawalpur washed its face for the event and spruced up the lane dividers and sent the sweepers into every nook and cranny. My regular rickshaw driver, normally sunk in an ink-dark gloom actually cracked a smile.

On the evening of the match there was an agog huddle in the family TV room, drinks had been laid in, cookies donated (by me) and there was an unhealthy fug of cheap cigarette smoke a bit reminiscent of a British pub before the smoking ban. The oldest spectator was just under a hundred years old and the youngest just over one. Plan A for me was to binge-watch the deeply addictive ‘Designated survivor’. It went down in about 10 minutes and for the first time in I don’t know how many years I watched a cricket match.

Clearly things had changed somewhat since I last cast my eyes over cricket. The bloody stumps actually lit up for one thing! The things at the top — bales? bails? — sparkled as they rose in the air in repeated slo-mo. And those uniforms! Good heavens! My old schoolmaster would have had apoplexy at this gallimaufry. The commentary might as well have been in Swahili for all the sense it made to me, and matters rattled on at quite a lick, unlike the days of tedium I am accustomed to. The family cheered and booed and ooooh-ed and aaaah-ed throughout and when it was all over there was general agreement that it was a lousy game but Jolly Good for the Country.

Well was it? Cynic that I am I have to say — probably not. Sport and politics have for millennia been awkward bedfellows and no less on this occasion. A five-layer ring of security may be impressive at one level, less so when one considers the necessity for such expenditure of human and material resources. It hardly speaks of a battle won, more a defensive back-foot reaction or the creation of a redoubt (the stadium) against a surrounding enemy.

Happy as I am that the match passed without any security-related incident, whatever positive effect it might have had on the national paradigm, how the people of Pakistan think and feel about the country they live in — has passed. It was ephemeral, gone within 24 hours at the level I live my life, because at bottom on Sunday night it was only a game, not a game-changer. Tootle-pip! 

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9^th, 2017.

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