Wounded Tiger: A history of cricket in Pakistan Wounded Tiger: A history of cricket in Pakistan

For the unbiased cricket fan, the Pakistani cricketteam has always represented maddening extremes:players of exhilarating talent who could and often didoutclass the world's best, but who were equally capable of losing to anybody in shambolic performances that embarrassed their most die hard supporters. Peter Oborne's magisterial history of Pakistani cricket is full of these heroes who sometimes scored zeroes. The best thing aboutis its delightful pen portraits of the principal Pakistani players, none better than that of Fazal Mahmood, with whom the book begins, and who led the newcomers to their historic Test victory at the Oval in 1954, and the greatest of them all, Hanif Mohammad, who scored a century against India with bandaged and bleeding toes and made 337 in 16 hours to save a Test in the West Indies.

Oborne's book otherwise ploughs somewhat familiar ground for those who have enjoyed Omar Noman's 1998 history, Pride and Passion: An Exhilarating Half Century of Cricket in Pakistan. Noman's was written with the enthusiasm of an amateur (its author, like me, was a United Nations official when he wrote it); Oborne's is that of a professional, meticulously researched and extensively footnoted, and it is more comprehensive, taking in everything from match-fixing to women's cricket, a neglected corner of the Pakistani game.

Every incident and anecdote ever recounted about Pakistani cricket can be found in Oborne's book, which succeeds in being encyclopaedic without being tedious. Still, there's more we might have enjoyed.

He spends a page and a half on "the most famous shot in cricket history", when in the final of the 1986 ustral-Asia Cup in Sharjah, Pakistan, chasing an Indian total of 245 for 7, were poised at 242 for 9 with just one ball to go and centurion Javed Miandad at the crease. India needed just one wicket (or a ball that conceded no more than two runs) to win the match; Pakistan, who apart from Miandad had been outclassed throughout the game, needed a boundary to pull off an unlikely victory. The inexperienced Indian paceman entrusted with the last over, Chetan Sharma, delivered a full toss, which Miandad pulled into the stands for a last-ball six. The stadium erupted, as did television audiences throughout the subcontinent; scenes of delirium shook the packed stands. Miandad finished on 116 not out; the next highest scorer in his side had made 36.

In a footnote, Oborne estimates that this extraordinary moment has been viewed perhaps 10 billion times since, on YouTube. But he omits much else: 36 different songs were composed and released in Pakistan to celebrate Miandad's six, and the batsman was awarded a million dollars for his genius. Pakistan had never before won a one-day tournament, whereas India were holders of the two most prestigious ODI trophies in the world. Miandad's stroke transformed Pakistan's self-belief as a oneday side, energised a nation and entered the folklore of the sport. Oborne doesn't tell us this.

He is also far too brief in describing Pakistan's loss of the 1996 World Cup quarter-finals to India in Bangalore. The reaction in Pakistan was calamitous. A college student emptied his Kalashnikov into his TV set and himself; another fan succumbed to a heart attack. The players' aircraft had to be diverted to Karachi to shield the players from the fury of the crowd that assembled to greet them at their scheduled destination, Lahore. The losing captain, Wasim Akram, received death threats, with some reading dark motives into his failure to play in the crucial encounter (had he played and been too unfit to make an impact, he would have been pilloried as well). A judge admitted a legal suit against the team, hinting darkly at corruption. A senior Islamic cleric, Maulana Naqshabandi, declared that Pakistan's defeat was its penalty for having elected a woman, Benazir Bhutto, to rule; such "obscene" imitations of Indian culture were bound, he argued, to bring about such tragic results. It took weeks for the sense of betrayal and grief to die down.

Oborne mentions none of this (only the rumours and charges against Wasim). Playing for a country beset by poverty, feudalism, religious fanaticism, terrorism, civil strife and frequent bouts of military rule, Pakistan's cricketers had to embody and sustain national pride. Carrying Pakistan's national pride on one's shoulders at a time of stress is never easy; doing it while losing to India at cricket is impossible. Oborne, regrettably, does not make enough of this, perhaps because he takes it for granted. His is a deeply affectionate book for a non-Pakistani; too often, it borders on the uncritical.

However, he digs up much new material, and the book offers many interesting insights, such as his depiction of the national team as "not a collection of deracinated individuals" but rather "a network of assorted family connections and friendships... Families and clans were one of the main seminaries of cricket in Pakistan." Overall, his pro-Pak sympathies-he sees "Western involvement with Muslim sport" as an example of Edward Said's "Orientalism" on the playing field-mean that he tends to gloss over the less palatable aspects of Pakistani cricketing chauvinism.

Oborne does not seriously discuss two vital featuresthat are fundamentally important to an appreciation of Pakistan cricket-the increasing militarisation of Pakistani society, including its sport; and the growing identification of Pakistani cricket with Pakistani nationalism. Pakistan, a state created for Muslims with a cricket team consisting almost entirely of Muslims, had to carve out its own distinctive "non-Indian" identity predicated entirely upon Islam. This was part of the unspoken agenda of the very first Pakistani touring team to India, and it would remain an undercurrent of cricket's role in nation-building. Finding a space for the new nation on the world's sports pages was to become a vital way of giving Pakistan its own role on the world stage.

It was no accident, therefore, that when Pakistan suffered the convulsions of a military coup in 1958, its new president, the rather grandly titled Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan, simultaneously served as the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan. The instrumentalisation of cricket in the service of a militarised nationalism is a leitmotiv that Pakistani cricket has yet to outgrow. Oborne is unkind to me in his Preface, accusing me of "carelessness" and worse in my own account of Indo-Pak cricket, Shadows Across the Playing Field (2009), so his own minor lapses are surprising, such as his frequent misspelling of the name of that wonderful commentator and diplomat, my good friend Jamsheed Marker, as "Markear".

Pakistani cricket is in a sad state today. Deprived of international matches after a terrorist strike on a Sri Lankan team prompted foreigners to refuse to tour the country, with an ageing team whose newer entrants seem to lack the spark of their mercurial and brilliant forebears, encumbered by a politics-ridden Board and chaotic selection policies, and amid declining popular support from a public deprived of cheering its heroes on their own soil, Pakistani cricket faces an uncertain future. Decline seems inevitable, but there is scarcely a whisper of it in Oborne's worshipful account. Perhaps one day Wounded Tiger will stand as a monument to the greatest years of a cricketing culture at the point that it began a long slow descent into mediocrity.

