Our cricket victory and the PCB

If the team wins the World Cup it will be a historic moment after 1992 when Imran Khan got to fight to the last.

By all counts, the current Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has been the worst we have ever had, yet the team selected by it has done well in the ICC World Cup 2011, beating the West Indies by 10 wickets in the quarter-final in Bangladesh, after beating the favourites, Australia, earlier. We don’t expect the serried ranks of cricket journalists to start praising the PCB chairman Ijaz Butt after this, just as we saw no concessions made when his team won the World Twenty20 in 2009.

The fact is that the team has gelled after a period of profound trouble emanating from a variety of sources, not least terrorism in Pakistan which has literally banned international cricket on our home grounds. The other trouble came from the lax moral and ethical standards inherited by the players from past administrations. The third cause was something that happens to all teams in the world: The transition from a set of old players to a new team of younger athletes, who have to be broken in before they can start performing.

Most criticism of the current board was valid and it came not only from the media, from journalists with unsatisfactory credentials, but also from senators who tried to get a publicity leg-up by challenging and insulting a chairman who eventually stopped appearing before them. But the current performance of the team should help reinstate the eclipsed grace of the PCB and its office-holders. The boys chosen by the much-criticised selectors have proved their mettle, gradually gaining the kind of temperament needed for the big occasion.

We don’t advocate a totally uncritical appreciation of the board and its chairman but we do invite the self-styled cricket experts to revisit their critique of the past. The recall of Misbahul Haq and his elevation to captaincy of the Test team had raised great ruckus but this time the board and its selectors were proved right. Misbah has not only won his stripes in Test matches but is also a permanent fixture in the One-Day team. Mr Butt was pilloried by critics fired by nationalism for his handling of the case of match-fixing in England by three top Pakistani cricketers, but as the drama unfolded, his approach was found to be correct: He neither abandoned the guilty players nor defied the ICC judges.

No board can be perfect. We are not surprised that every chairman in the past has had to bow out after losing his battle with the media and numberless experts who insist on hounding the current office-bearers. This proves only one point and that is that we are extreme in our reaction to a game that engages our passion. This is proved daily when the common cricket-lover rings up during interactive TV discussions and says things that cannot be stomached by any knowledgeable and moderate person. This is bound to happen again if we don’t take care.

Imran Khan has sounded the warning. He says don’t become over-optimistic and put too big a burden of expectations on a team that is still in a process of gelling. Pakistan has the best bowlers if you read the statistics of the current World Cup; but India has the best batsmen by the same reckoning. Australia has been defeated once but it can bounce back. Sobriety should prevail after realising that the Cup has been characterised by more upsets than is the norm. Pakistan was upset by New Zealand but it came back by upsetting Australia. Why can’t the same thing happen in the case of Australia?

Yet it is realistic to hope for a victory against India/Australia in the semi-finals, and after that, the victory will go to anyone who plays better on the day of the battle. And the final may turn out to be easier than the semi-final match. If the team wins the World Cup it will be a historic moment, coming after 1992 when Imran Khan got a non-favourite team to fight to the last. But this time our team would have achieved a greater victory — victory over terrorism, of hope against despair — and some of the kudos will have to go to the PCB.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th, 2011.