Pakistan players may be unpredictable, but they deserve better fans

KARACHI: The longest format of the game has been kind to Pakistan of late, and the team has gone from sixth in the rankings to third in a matter of weeks.

A lot has been said about the way they bounced back from the demoralising whitewash in the ODIs to win 2-0 against Australia, the mighty Australia; Pakistan’s bogey team.

The team defiantly performed wonders in the UAE and back home, hundreds of miles away, heads turned with each act of defiance. The Dubai Test was written off as a one-off by the more cynical of fans but after the Abu Dhabi Test even they had to take notice.

By the time New Zealand came around, the nation no longer hoped but expected. The first match proved to be more of the same, Abu Dhabi was as much a stroll in the park for Pakistan as you can get at this level.

By the second Test, there was once again a minor fervour about cricket in Pakistan. When the coin was tossed up in the air for the Dubai Test, most of Pakistan was watching, confident that their team would wrap up their second series in a row with a routine win.

Unbeknownst to them, back at the ground where it had all started, Pakistan had come full circle, the smallest of circles but a full circle nonetheless. Their demons, it proved, had not been laid to rest but were merely asleep.

New Zealand batsmen continued to make runs but were still troubled every now and then; Pakistan’s bowlers have always been mercurial if not anything else. So when Tom Latham got an edge that flew to gully, Pakistan did not hope, it expected. Azhar Ali, usually safe as houses, dropped it. Then he dropped another.

Suddenly, the unpredictably that the fans had cheered on in the last three matches seemed like a burden. Pakistan were supposed to dismiss New Zealand at a canter, instead the Kiwis lost just three on the first day.

Pakistan’s mercurial nature came to the fore once again at the start of day two. Rahat Ali had seemed so docile on day one and just when it was all becoming uninteresting, he delivered; bowling a brute of a delivery that shaped in but then left Latham, who could only nick it to the keeper. The hosts were back in it but two more catches were dropped and the bowlers failed to dismiss the tail to hand the initiative back to New Zealand.

Pakistan may very well save this Test, maybe even win it, but there will invariably be criticisms of their unpredictability if they don’t, just like there were praises for it before. The team will be condemned for not delivering when they should have, and the times that they delivered when they had no right to would be forgotten.

We have been here before. Four years ago when the darling of the nation, Muhammad Amir, with all his youthful exuberance, was stopped in his tracks by the fixing scandal we were here too. The ban was seen as too harsh by many in the country and Pakistan’s fan rallied under an ‘us-vs-them’ mentality. Pakistan was a nation wronged and the 11 on the pitch were there to rectify that, or so the fans saw it. Rectify they did, as Pakistan made it to the semi-finals of the 2011 World Cup and whitewashed the then number one side England.

Then it all went downhill as the team struggled in both Tests and ODIs, the fans turned against the players and it all culminated in chants of ‘Go Misbah Go’ echoing through the half empty stands of the UAE.

Now a similarly ‘us-vs-them’ mentality is being garnered with Saeed Ajmal’s suspension and Muhammad Hafeez called up. This is a conspiracy to derail Pakistan’s 2015 World Cup, they feel, and so the team is supported once again.

But Pakistan fans should do better than rally against an invisible enemy, an imaginary and non-existent enemy, and rather rally behind their team. Surely the players for all their flaws, exiled from their own country, deserve as much. Perhaps they deserve it all the more due to their flaws; Pakistan always find favour with the neutrals due to their penchant to thrill, then why should they not find it with their own fans also?

The men in green are one of the cricket’s best advertisements, electrifying players all. They, more than any other team, need their fans to stick by them through thick and thin. They need them to realise that Pakistan have never been a side built to stay at the top but nor are they one built to stay at the bottom for very long either. They have had to defy the odds time and again on their own, just the 11 on the pitch, forsaken by their fans.

The team will continue to confound the experts — naysayers and hopefuls alike — and they will continue playing the game in the same frustratingly mercurial fashion that they have always played it in so the fans need to accept the team for what it is; worthy of being celebrated not despite its flaws but because of them.

No more closed television sets, no more empty seats in the UAE, no more condemning our own. It is high time that the fans cheer on each and every player that wears Pakistan colours. They are, after all, one of the few remaining heroes of a nation troubled.

 

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