There’s an argument to be made that nothing useful, nothing worthwhile, and certainly nothing great in life arrives without a core central tension having made it possible. No rock band worth anything worked without friction, usually between the key protagonists, the guitarist and the frontman. On going through a very long list of the greatest, it is possible to even argue that no band can ever be great without harbouring at heart a desire to implode, which is as forceful as the desire to create.

The tension is finite. At some point it burns itself out and that, usually, is that. But for its duration, what it does is map out this boundary, as arbitrary as many national boundaries, between greatness and implosion. It is a thin, porous border. Near the edge on one side is the space of a band’s greatest work. On the other, kaput, it’s over. The tension has eaten them up.

In many ways, the history of Pakistan’s best sides mirrors those of the greatest rock bands. Propelled by this central tension to unseen heights before, abruptly, it was too much and they are no more. This leitmotif was laid down at the earliest, when Abdul Hafeez Kardar lorded over every domain in Pakistan cricket, except inside the head of Fazal Mahmood. You may be leading us on to the field, Mahmood used to tell Kardar in grudging acceptance of his status as captain, but I will lead us off it—in a boast of his own capabilities as match-winner.

This was to be the enduring pattern: captain and star man, in cahoots and at odds. Every rivalry has its own identity, its own fuel, and there was a lot going on in that one; personal grudges, class issues, clashing senses of entitlement. In Mahmood, working to prove Kardar inadequate in some way, or at least lesser by comparison, he, of course, elevated him. Mahmood won matches, matches that counted as wins in Kardar’s tenure. Neither was happy with the other, but in the end, Pakistan was happy. This was the truth about boxing that Muhammad Ali hit upon in one of those freewheeling rhymes before rap was even a thing: “We gonna get it on, cos we don’t get along."

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Javed Miandad (left) and Imran Khan. Photo: Patrick Eagar/Patrick Eagar Collection/Getty Images

This World Cup represents one last chance for the driving, opposing forces of this mini-age. Four years ago, Shahid Afridi led Misbah-ul-Haq at the World Cup, having just pipped him in the run-in to become leader. This time it is Misbah’s turn to lead. He replaced Afridi soon after the last World Cup and has just about held him off since to remain in place. Just recently he overcame a late, nakedly open grab for the post by Afridi. It is a lesser tension than the other examples, but it is there. Relations between the pair are not exactly acrimonious, nor are they exactly harmonious. It has more fizz and life than a drifting marriage, but less than an irreparable one.

Now it used to be that the contrast between any two spheres of power in a Pakistan team was a simple, digestible one. It never was that simple, but it felt like it was easy to break it down that way: posh Kardar, rootsy Fazal; Karachiite Hanif, Lahori Saeed; vilayati Imran, desi Javed; Imran’s old favourite Wasim, Imran’s new favourite Waqar.

Afridi and Misbah are even more straightforward. How much further, after all, can a contrast be reduced beyond boom boom and tuk tuk? One blaster, one blocker; one action-movie hero, one hushed wildlife-documentary narrator; Afridi rampaging across fields like a cyclone, Misbah drifting over them like a cloud. Misbah represents something older and mannered, a tehzeeb. Afridi represents a present and also future, though the latter is not entirely accurate: He has zipped around on the edge of the future without quite being the future for 20 years now.

In truth the friction between Misbah and Afridi hasn’t really helped Pakistan even if, in the 130 One Day International (ODI) matches they have played together, they have won considerably more than they have lost. They have still been, overall, an ordinary One Day team in their time, the pair unable to especially elevate their status or significantly lower it. In fact, it has produced exactly the kind of bipolarity such directly opposing forces might be expected to create. They win like Afridi, they lose like Misbah, but neither identifiably.

Instead, what makes the pair so compelling is what, taken together, they represent: which is either end of a long, middle-less scale. That scale is not just of Pakistan’s performance but of the emotion of life—maybe even existence itself—in Pakistan. From the worst of Misbah to the best of Afridi, as a toll for being Pakistani, is perhaps not the same in depth-of-feeling as going from the mass killing of children to, say, Coke Studio. But it is the same, giddying swing, with almost nothing in between the mourning and the celebrating, between despairing at defeat and exulting in triumph.

Together, though, they also represent another notion, of how a particular kind of developing nation progresses or, rather, doesn’t. One way to see both would be as separate industries driving economic growth: Afridi as the surging, scary burst of the telecom industry and Misbah as the more sedate, traditional driver, such as agriculture.

But the more revelatory way might be to surmise a co-dependency. Maybe it applies only to Pakistan’s model of development but it’s impossible not to see the battle between Afridi’s urges and Misbah’s restraints in macroeconomic terms. Is the pull and push between the pair not similar to, say, the tension between untrammelled zones of free market growth being offset by the overt, suffocating omnipresence of state and bureaucracy?

Free market champions may feel, instinctively, that one is retarding the growth of the other. Statists might counter that some element of oversight and even control is necessary lest free markets veer towards black marketeering tendencies. But, ultimately, the economy goes neither too far forward nor too far back, condemned in the unsatisfactory grey of private-public partnership. How far removed does that sound from the effects of Afridi-Misbah on Pakistan’s cricket?

Pakistan are unlikely to win the World Cup (if they win it, Pakistan will have defeated economic theory). This will be the last One Day cricket Misbah and Afridi play, or at least that is what they say. If so, we will finally be rid of that other economic imposition—the zero-sum equation they have created in which to love one, you must hate the other... And Pakistan? Finally, they might move on; though who knows in what shape or direction.

Osman Samiuddin is a sportswriter at The National, Abu Dhabi, and author of The Unquiet Ones: A History Of Pakistan Cricket.

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