England v Pakistan: a short but incendiary history

Among the many questionable decisions made by English cricket captains, few can have been quite so unwise as the one taken by Donald Carr on the evening of 26 February 1956. That was the night Carr and six of his team-mates put on masks, slipped into the Services Hotel in Peshawar, gagged the Pakistani umpire Idris Baig, carried him by his limbs down the back staircase, dumped him in a horse-drawn carriage, drove him across town to Dean’s Hotel, sat him in a chair, offered him a drink, and then poured two buckets of cold water over his head. By comparison, Nasser Hussain’s decision to put Australia in seems eminently sensible, Tony Greig’s promise to make the West Indians grovel somewhat regrettable.

Carr, who died last month, said at the time that his prank was “considered terribly funny by everyone who was there”, including several of the Pakistani players, who, having heard Baig had been abducted, set out in a search party and arrived in time to find him soaking wet. The conspicuous exception was Baig himself, who soon threatened to sue the MCC “for injury to his person”, and was still wearing a sling two days later. The Pakistani press were even less amused. “The terrible incident took place last night will not only shake the world,” one report ran, “rather, it will defame the respected game of cricket.” That same article also accused England of “torturing” the teetotal Baig by forcing him to drink whisky.

If it wasn’t already apparent, the degree to which Carr had misjudged the mood became clear when his team returned to the ground after the rest day and found themselves surrounded by a crowd chanting “Shame! Shame!” and “MCC go home!” For the rest of the tour, England travelled with an armed police guard. The British Deputy High Commission in Lahore went into lockdown, and, according to one of the staff, the only reason there wasn’t a riot at the gates was because of the torrential rain. The tour would have been called off if the MCC president, Field Marshal Alexander of Tunis, had not made a sincere apology to his counterpart at the Pakistani board, Iskander Mirza, an old colleague of his from the campaigns on the North-West Frontier.

Even after the team had left, the British Deputy High Commissioner complained that the incident had caused a “tremendous setback” in relations between the two nations. As for Carr, well, he thought it had all been a good bit of a fun. Baig was a stuffy sort, who once told the MCC’s tour manager Geoffrey Howard: “You must understand … that a lot of the crowd come to watch me umpire.” It’s not a coincidence that the same day Baig was dunked in water, he had also given three dubious LBWs against England, and turned down a certain one of their own. So Carr felt Baig deserved the ragging. “Quite honestly, when I look back on the Peshawar incident,” he told the MCC committee when he was back in Britain, “I think it was about the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life.”

These details – and many more – are all in Peter Oborne’s book Wounded Tiger, one of the two brilliant histories of Pakistani cricket published in 2015, along with Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones. This being Pakistani cricket, there’s so much material that the books are entirely different from one another. In fact there’s probably a third to be written solely on the relations between the English and Pakistani teams. Because, as Samiuddin wrote in an article in 2006, this is a rivalry which doesn’t rely on the “conventional ingredients” of sport, geography, say, or a history of close matches, so much as it does more “maddeningly complex” matters, often each team’s peculiar ability to offend the other’s sensibilities.

Of course there is a shared history there, which some of Pakistan’s captains, in particular Imran Khan and Javed Miandad, often used as motivation. “For years, Pakistani teams on foreign tours found it difficult to shake a sense of inferiority,” Miandad wrote. “Perhaps we were embarrassed to be from a third world country that not too long ago had been ruled by white colonialists.” On Pakistan’s first tour in 1954, they didn’t bring a scorer, or a single accredited journalist, but were accompanied by an official from the Pakistan High Commission “whose task was to educate the British public”. Because, as the team realised to their great surprise, “many British people did not know that Pakistan existed”.

Wisden described them as “virtually an unknown team … estimated to be no better than average county standard.” When England won by an innings and 129 runs at Trent Bridge, Neville Cardus decided “a mistake was made by those authorities who decided the time was now ripe for Test matches between England and Pakistan.” And then Pakistan won the fourth Test at the Oval, thanks in the main to the remarkable fast bowling of Fazal Mahmood. In the minutes after the victory, the man who founded the Pakistan Cricket Board, Chief Justice Alvin Cornelius, was said to have been seen striding around the pavilion shouting “Call Hutton! Call Compton! And tell them to learn from Fazal how to play cricket!”

The MCC responded by sending an “A” side – the team led by Carr – out for a return tour. Pakistan would have to wait seven years for another full Test against England. That was in 1961, and it was one of the few played since to pass without controversy of one kind or another, even if nothing more serious than English complaints about the standard of umpiring in Pakistan after a fruitless day in the field, or Pakistani complaints about the standard of the covers in England after they had been bowled out on a sticky dog. In the 1970s, these tours often took place against ugly backdrops, as racist attacks against Pakistanis living in Britain became more common. Imran Khan, who studied at Oxford, also had experience of what Hanif Kureishi called “the more polite forms of hatred”.

It’s easy to forget just how sulphurous relations became. That, as Wisden put it, “at best the English players came to regard Pakistani umpires as incompetent, at worst cheats”, that the Sun once offered its readers a “Sun Fun” dartboard with a picture of Shakoor Rana on it (hit him between the eyes with a double top), that columnists who should have known better – the Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer – described Pakistan as the “pariahs of cricket” and argued that “no team has more merited the opprobrium of international cricket community”, that the National Front picketed some of the matches on Pakistan’s 1987 tour, that a Pakistani fan had his throat slashed outside Trent Bridge that same year.

From 1984, Ian Botham’s “mother-in-law” tour, onwards, the series has been one long litany of headlines. Mike Gatting’s confrontation with Shakoor Rana, the accusations of cheating made against Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis in 1992, the ensuing court-case when Ian Botham and Allan Lamb tried, and failed, to sue Imran for libel, the night-time finish of the third Test in Karachi in 2000, when umpire Steve Bucknor punished Pakistan for their time-wasting, Shahid Afridi’s ban for scuffing the pitch while a nearby explosion distracted everyone’s attention in 2005, the forfeited Test at The Oval in 2006, when Imzamam-ul-Haq’s refused to lead his team out after they were penalised five runs. And, of course, the spot-fixing scandal in 2010.

It’s a lot of history to fit into 32 years. There’s a hope – if not necessarily an expectation – that this summer will turn out to be one of the more uneventful encounters between the two, even with Mohammad Amir’s comeback. In Misbah-ul-Haq and Alastair Cook we have two cool old captains, neither keen to fan sparks into flames. But the truth is, in this incendiary contest, you just never know how it will go.

• This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe just visit this page, find ‘The Spin’ and follow the instructions.