How have Pakistan thrived in adversity and turned imminent defeats into inevitable victories? By relying on match-winners, eschewing analysis and trusting in their unwavering self-belief
One November night in Sharjah, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene came together to do what they had been doing for what seems now like forever. It was a warm, oily evening, the air heavy and lubricated. The pair had come together at 53 for 3, chasing 201 for the win. The pitch was a dirty, grubby orangey-brown, where strokes regularly went through before ball reached bat, Pakistan were 2-1 up in the series and playing in a recrudescent stadium, but this was about as routine as firefighting could get.
Neither batsman was comfortable to begin with because you couldn’t really be on that surface. But once they got past the first 20 minutes, the familiarity of the task’s requirements took over. Boundaries were bonuses – only three came in 17 overs from the 18th onwards – so, like good traffic cops, they simply kept the flow moving along. Single here, double there, single here, double there, nice and steady. By the 38th over, they had put on 102 and were looking as settled as two old buddies watching the game on an old, much-shared couch.
Sri Lanka now needed just 46 with 74 balls still to come (the required run-rate wasn’t high, but the nature of the pitch made it a little steeper). The crowd, largely Pathan, were still pretty cheery but attention from the match had slipped, taken over by the occasion itself; Pakistan were after all returning to a venue where they had created love and magic and darkness after many years.
We were sitting in the press box which in the revamped stadium was at Sangakkara’s long-on when, from around the wicket, Shahid Afridi skipped in to bowl his sixth over. He’d had an eventful game and an even more eventful, but inactive, six months preceding the series. In that time, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) had stripped Afridi of the limited overs captaincy after he made public a dispute with Waqar Younis, the coach at the time and with whom his relationship had always been the wrong side of edgy.
It went the way all big feuds in Pakistan cricket do. It became legal after the PCB, in a fit of pique, stopped Afridi from playing for Hampshire. Then it became political, Afridi pooling the many cards permanently at his disposal – Pathan by birth, a lifelong Karachiite, the land’s most popular cricketer, a true celebrity and among their best limited overs bowler in recent years – and bringing them to bear down on the board. The interior minister became involved, as did the President (rumoured only, and in the kind of detached way he is said to be ultimately involved in everything, at the level of invisible ombudsman).
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Compromises were reached, petitions and objections withdrawn. Afridi, who had “conditionally” retired in protest, eventually withdrew his retirement but only after Ijaz Butt had been replaced by Zaka Ashraf as board chairman. Now in his fourth game back, he’d first steadied Pakistan with the bat: his 75 from 65 balls, plump with loudly cheered singles and doubles, meant Pakistan survived being 97 for 6. The innings was slow by Afridi’s standards but his best and most adult in some time.
Now he came in, shining with sweat, and angled one in. First he beat Sangakkara on length, the batsman pressing, then pushing forward but realising he wasn’t forward enough. Then his leg-break spun, which doesn’t always happen, zipped through Sangakkara’s attempted drive and bowled him. Chewing gum, Afridi turned around and produced his trademark, star-man celebration. It was muted though, chest not as far out, legs only slightly apart. There was less gusto, more the resignation of a man who had done a hundred takes of it already and this, really, was just one too many. Apart from the wicketkeeper, Sarfraz Ahmed, happy to just be in the side, none of the players who gathered around Afridi looked overly chuffed.
In the press box I turned to Shahid Hashmi, the AFP sports stringer for Pakistan, and we both silently acknowledged a possibility. We did it knowingly, but without knowing precisely what we were being knowing about. As most agency guys would have done, he’d already prepared much of his copy, meticulously reporting a comfortable Sri Lanka win. Only the details needed to be put in. Now we looked at each other and he decided, just to be safe (which, as a rule for agency-writing, is top five) to start writing an alternative copy, for a Pakistan win.
On air in the commentary box was Waqar Younis and he left behind a thought that like a trail of cigarette smoke, hung around deliciously. “Has this come too late, or is there a twist in the tale?” A few days later we were discussing the game and that moment in particular. “I was doing commentary and I said it very clearly on air, what I am saying to you right now, I can sense something here, we just need one wicket,” Waqar said. “When Sanga got out, I said OK. Roshan [Abeysinghe] was with me and he said, no it’s over. They showed some girls praying, he said those prayers aren’t going to work. I said hold on, I can sense something here. Just one more wicket here and you watch this game, seriously, you watch this game.”
Indeed the game demanded watching. The night, prostrate and drained, gave in to Afridi and Pakistan. He had been limping until then, the result of a nasty knee injury while fielding that had forced him off the field and put in doubt his further participation. But now he took four more wickets. Sri Lanka, including Sangakkara’s wicket, lost seven for 19 in around seven overs to lose a game they had won in everything but the actual winning, by 26 runs. Hashmi had sent in his copy, complete with alternate opening and end, on the dot of the last ball.
A week or so after the game, I met Younis Khan for an interview and asked him about the turnaround. “See this is the tradition of Sharjah. Twenty-five runs are needed and [Abdul] Razzaq and Azhar Mahmood come and take four wickets, three wickets, or Wasim Akram comes on and puts in a spell … this is a tradition we keep alive.”
I don’t know how or why it was that. I, like Hashmi and Waqar, sensed the continuation of this tradition at that precise moment. There was no sound reason for it. Even after that wicket, Sri Lanka could and should have coasted it. But millions of others had it as well, probably, a fleeting feeling when Sangakkara went that Pakistan were about to turn it on, a feeling as real as a smell you smell, a sound you hear, a taste you taste and a dance you dance.
What we know of what happens, roughly, is this. Pakistan are in the field (almost exclusively so), drifting, amiably and contentedly, to defeat over five days, or one. They are comatose flat. Bowlers, uninspired, are on autopilot; the fielders are heavy and ponderous. If there is a target, it’s down to, say, 45 off the last 10 with seven wickets in hand. If it’s a Test, the target being chased is a small one, under 200, or if it is the first innings, the opposition are 200 for 2. Coasting.
Sometimes but not always it takes an unusual dismissal to turn on the light: a run-out, an electric catch, a part-timer taking a wicket. And then there is total frenzy, a frenzy so overwhelming and real you can hold it in your hands. It can be deeply moving even through the sensory dilution and sanitisation of TV, even on ball-by-ball commentary online. But to let it get right inside your head and start rearranging your brain, like acid but a lighter, less paranoid burn, you have to be there as it happens.
There is music, not heard but felt, a beat somewhere in the background, rising, unrelenting. Wickets begin to fall in heaps, twice or thrice in an over and each one seems the only logical conclusion to that particular spell of play. There is an appeal almost every ball, most justified. Fielders start hitting the stumps and taking catches that, in other situations and times, we could easily imagine them dropping.
If you’re a Pakistani, to watch this phase is to be removed into the elemental tape-ball game you might have played at the weekend in some street somewhere that only has a field on the leg-side. It is a devolved version of cricket: amateur, random, frantic. There is no ICC code, no strategy, no rules, no coaches, no support staff, no coaching manuals, no formality.
Pakistan begin to inflict their own chaos on the opposition, except that where they are using it as a force for good, the opposition is crumbling under the weight of it. If one moment accurately captures this frenzy – not the skill or beauty of it, but just the two-sided chaos – it is the run-out of Jonty Rhodes in an ODI Pakistan played in Durban in February 1993.
Pakistan had limped to 208 in their innings and South Africa were cruising, first at 101 for no loss, then with 10 overs to go, when they needed just 50 with nine wickets in hand. Asif Mujtaba, of all bowlers, began the collapse and by the time Rhodes fell, the sixth wicket, the show was in full, uncensored flow. Brian McMillan plays and misses at a Wasim Akram delivery. Spooked by the collapse, Rhodes tries to sneak a single. The wicketkeeper Rashid Latif, alert to this now, hits the stumps with an underarm throw. McMillan is safe but Rhodes has just arrived at the same end and, defeated, runs on, his fate decided.
Akram has run halfway down the pitch and appeals to nobody in particular at the first hit, maybe just celebrating a direct hit. Realising that it isn’t a run-out but instead an opportunity for one at the other end, he starts running back. Mujtaba comes jogging in from point, still aware, picks up the ball and lobs it gently and high to the non-striker’s end. There, along with the retreating Akram, are now assembled Mushtaq Ahmed, Salim Malik and Inzamam-ul-Haq.
Mujtaba’s lob is a little high for Akram, who has to leap to get it as he’s moving back (his back to the stumps), his momentum carrying him past the stumps as he grabs the ball. Momentarily, as he turns and finds no stumps in front of him, there is panic. Meanwhile, Malik also tries to catch the ball behind Akram – just to make sure? – and as he moves back he hits the stumps, nearly falling over, and knocks the bails off. More panic. Luckily little Mushy is at hand logging everything that is going on (Inzamam, as always, is inert) and he deliriously points Akram to the stumps: “Behind you, behind you!” as if Akram may not recognise the three stumps he’s been bowling to for the better part of his life.
Akram plucks out a stump and gleefully taps it with the ball, relief, elation, adrenalin all coiling into another. Rhodes is halfway back to the hotel by this point, unaware of the mess he left behind. It’s YouTube gold:
Waqar calls these moments a tamasha, a spectacle, but also a cross between a rolling circus and a fair: “I don’t think you need anyone at that time to calm you down because if somebody calms you down, you just break the rhythm. The other day, when Afridi and Saeed Ajmal was happening, thak-thak-thak it was going, you don’t need anyone to come and say ‘no, no, we need to do it like this’ or that. Misbah was just sitting waiting, letting it run: ‘Tamasha lag gaya he, chal ne do isse (‘Let the tamasha run’). And it is a tamasha. I swear to God, we used to say it, we used to talk about it like this: ‘It’s begun, come, grab on to it’) that kind of language in the middle.”
To the spectator, the entire passage can be supremely disorienting, the head buzzing like a mobile phone on silent. You’re trying to understand what’s happening in front of you, how it’s happening, when it started happening, how it will finish, will it ever finish, do you even have time to enjoy it, and before you know it, it’s over and you’re sitting there stunned, like the first reaction to death and not knowing how to react and you’re alive and flushing and you’re a fool because it’s happened already and it’s over and what the fuck just happened. What just happened is that Pakistan did a Pakistan, a tamasha that is so unique and delirious and Pakistani, that it says something specifically about them.
Pakistan doing a Pakistan represents the occasional triumph of raw over manufactured, organic over processed food and individual craftsmanship over mass production. That is to appreciate it. To understand it? That is important because we’re talking here about moments or days during which life doesn’t work as we know it should.
There are rational ways to look at this, no less compelling for their reasonableness and each with their own specific context. After the Abu Dhabi Test win over England in 2012, when Pakistan bowled them out for 72 (defending 145), Misbah-ul-Haq rationalised how they had done it (he seemed also to be consoling England). Fourth innings targets you know, always tricky no matter how small; five days’ worth of pressure aggregating itself in one chase; struggled against spin, and so on.
In the 1990s these passages of play came to personify the Pakistan side so much. In England, Sri Lanka, in the West Indies, in Sharjah, in New Zealand (especially and always New Zealand), they became so abundant, that it looked like it was happening to formula. It was the unplanned plan: wait for the ball to become old (or make it so), get it reversing, hand it to either Wasim or Waqar or maybe one of the new kids who’s just come in but was born with balls of steel and knows just what to do with the ball and watch the tamasha.
Alongside Wasim, Waqar remains the most vivid ringmaster of the tamasha and as he had also just had a productive stint as the side’s coach, I asked him to make sense of it. “I tell you what, you know why this happens?” Waqar begins. “Because we’ve always had match-winners, individual match-winners. Not the team. Our team used to be titther-bitther [literally meaning scattered, but in this sense disunited and disparate] in the early days but there were guys like Wasim, myself, Inzi, Saeed Anwar, you know, one-man show kind of players. We used to have so many that we would never lose hope.
“Even the game you are talking about, the Total Trophy, in that, 40 runs, with seven or eight wickets left ... I still remember. I remember very few things from the ground, some big wickets of course, but there are certain things you do remember. I ran when Kirsten got out to Mujtaba, I ran to the guys and said, look, they need 40 runs, we need seven wickets, but we can see a window, there is a window. I said, it’s one wicket, the ball was swinging, new batsmen, no chance.”
Pakistan’s traditionally rich variety of unorthodox bowlers also means they pounce on new batsmen like no other side in the world, but in that situation, before it happens, why are they so flat? “No, no, it’s not flat. It’s a waiting game. Sometimes in any game when the momentum goes to the other side, the fielding side becomes a bit flat. But we knew, back of our minds, every guy, Wasim, me, Inzi, Moin, even he could see and sense those small things, that there is an opportunity. Suddenly, jaan aajati he [you become alive]. When you have match-winners, when your bowler senses something, then your fielders pick up on it, they go along with them, you can see, you can see in the eyes.”
You could tell that day in Durban? “Not just in that match, but in that series, where Wasim also got five wickets in East London and they needed 30-odd runs in a similar situation, and thak-thak-thak, gone. You can sense those things. That was us.”
But how has Pakistan been so good at doing this? “We’ve never given importance to coaching. We were never analytical, or scientific. That guy is there [he points to the video analysis man in the dressing room balcony], yah, sure he’s there. And he’s sitting there, and it’s kind of a highlights package and you can sit and analyse moments. But actually in the 1990s we never did analyse anyone: ‘He plays well here, don’t give him there.’ It’s not, how long do you bowl at him there, what kind of field, what lengths, what is the B-plan, the C-plan, after that if it goes wrong, what happens? We had one plan. Go out there, get a wicket. We had resources. We sensed it and said, OK, bring Waqar back. Not even the captain [decided]. Sometimes I would go to the captain, give me two overs, let me do it. It was a kind of teamwork within the team but not like we’ll have a plan from before.
“No other country does it. Match-winners are always handy. Shoaib Akhtar? Match-winner. He’ll be ugly throughout the game, but one or two overs he’ll change it, one spell. That’s why you play those characters. You can’t put the game in a shell where you have to be calculating, or planned or on this laptop, seeing how often this guy has gotten that guy out. Don’t do that.”
And then, quite unprompted, he inadvertently revealed just how powerful a thing it is to be part of (or, unsaid, to watch). He spoke of it like someone who’s gone cold turkey: “It’s that thrill I miss. If you ask me what I miss about cricket, I don’t want to go out and bowl again because I’m dead, tired. But I miss that part, the thrill. In that [South Africa] match, we were so hyped up, so much adrenaline was pumping. When we got back to the hotel, my eyes were swollen. I had to go to a doctor, there was so much there. That I miss, that rush of blood.”
But the easiest mistake to make would be to assume that this is only about the pressure of fourth-innings totals, or the ability to reverse, or even that this is a recent manifestation. Take Sarfraz Nawaz’s spell of seven for one in 33 balls in Melbourne in March 1979 (just repeat that slowly to yourself, roll it around your head slowly like some fine wine to fully appreciate the flavour: yup, it’s that crazy a spell). Not only is it commonly thought to of as one of the first sightings of reverse swing as we now know and love it, but it’s also one of the most startling instances of Pakistan doing a Pakistan: Australia were coasting at 305 for 3, chasing 382 for victory. Soon they were all out for 310.
The only thing is, it’s not so clear if it was reverse swing. The frazzled footage available of it does reveal swing, and late swing in particular, but it’s not conclusive. The Wisden Almanack records that Allan Border and Kim Hughes, in putting on 172, had “carried on steadily through the second new ball and until half an hour after tea, when Sarfraz bowled Border off a deflection with a beautiful ball that cut back sharply.” That dismissal began the slide and it seems the ball was oldish by then. In his autobiography, captain Mushtaq Mohammad freely admits that players gave “the seam a bit of a lift” during the spell, as well as the more legal application of “good old-fashioned sweat, spit and polish” to get such swing; in other words, it was probably reverse (and Sarfraz could nurse the ball like he nursed grievances, carefully and deliberately).
In the unintentionally comic post-match TV interview, Sarfraz credits this bowling starburst to the dowdy black and white virtues of sticking to a line and length, though it seems like interviewer and interviewee are playing some Candid Camera-type practical joke on the viewer. (It is entirely possible that Sarfraz was still hiding the idea of reverse swing from the public). But a few years ago, I asked him about that spell and he was emphatic. “That wasn’t reverse swing,” he said, as if offended that he was being reduced to a one-trick pony. “I had taken two wickets with the new ball, then three or four with the old ball, and then the new ball again.”
Sarfraz is often an unreliable teller of stories though. The evening he told me this, he also tried to explain the connections between match-fixing, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and a Scotland Yard cover-up. But in his earliest autobiography, Imran Khan also makes no mention of late swing of any kind; only that Sarfraz, as he always did, used the conditions extremely well and had a good eye for picking the new ball that might swing most.
Forget this and go further back for more definitive proof that this is about the soul of Pakistan cricket and reverse swing was merely a means of expression. What else but an intrinsic condition could explain the manner of Pakistan’s landmark 24-run win at The Oval in 1954? England were 109 for two on the fourth day of that last Test, chasing 168, with Peter May and Denis Compton at the crease. Pakistan were playing their ninth Test ever, against arguably the strongest side of that decade (between 1951 and 1961 England won nine out of 11 home series) and reverse swing was not yet even a twitch in someone’s fingernail.
And yet, led primarily by Fazal Mahmood, Pakistan managed to drop catches and still instigate a remarkable collapse of eight for 34 in round about two hours. Fazal began dropping the ball every time exactly where he wanted. So sharp and overpowering had his intuition become that once, as Kardar was about to take him off, he snatched the ball before another bowler could be found, ran in and bowled. He immediately got the critical wicket of Peter May, caught by Kardar himself. Later, Fazal would show to Shujauddin exactly where he wanted him to stand at a short square leg: “You put your right foot here, left foot there, unfold your hands and stand ready for a catch. The ball will come right into your hands and you just grab it.” Next ball the last remaining English hope Johnny Wardle prodded Fazal’s leg-cutter straight to Shujauddin, who didn’t need to move.
The most forceful evidence that this unique ability to summarily summon madness is a character trait more than just a skill, has come recently. The shows Pakistan put on in Sharjah against Sri Lanka and Abu Dhabi against England were not even created by fast bowlers. Spinners wrote these scripts.
As partial explanation, I’m tempted to put some stock in simple Pakistani bluster and bluff. It’s the old Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto trick (the first truly populist and most seminal prime minister of Pakistan), of being down and out but fooling – or willing – everyone into believing that you’ve never been as powerful as this before. Bhutto’s political career and legend was built on this tricky but captivating duality.
The most outrageous and instructive example was abetting in the splitting of the country in 1971 and then pretending that it was a gargantuan slight upon him and the country. It was crystallised in a memorable address to the UN Security Council in December 1971, a day before Pakistan surrendered to India in the war that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh. Lounging back in his seat, allowing for the full effect of his feudal lordship, Bhutto promised that his country would fight (he had earlier promised they would fight for a thousand years, as they had already been fighting for the last 1,000 years), admonishing the Security Council, chiding and taunting them. It was all bluff because he himself – and West Pakistan – had played such a role in matters coming to this pass. Then, mid-rant, he tore up the notes in front of him and walked out, vanquished to everyone, but victorious to himself and his country. He then proceeded – briefly – to shake the country alive.
On a cricket field, this is like Pakistan strutting around pretending that the opposition needs 30 runs to get off two balls with a single wicket in hand, when in reality they need 35 runs off eight overs with seven wickets left. A game lost, in other words, merely being the apparition of a game won. Bhutto was the most potent symbol of this. But running through the list of the greatest names of Pakistan cricket, note how many of them were of similar blood, some to the point of delusion: Abdul Hafeez Kardar, Fazal, Sarfraz, Waqar, Afridi, Wasim, Javed Miandad, Imran, Shoaib.
The more illuminating examples are actually those with less talent still bluffing the opposition with their bluster. Ask yourself how on some days guys like Aaqib Javed, Azhar Mahmood, Aamer Sohail (on most days), Moin Khan and Ijaz Ahmed walked around like they owned not only the pitch, but the world itself?
I had an email discussion with Saad Shafqat about this, suggesting to him that this bluster, the sense that even if they’re wrong or lost, they are right and winning, is critical to such moments. A little denial perhaps, or even a refusal to accept matters for what they are. Saad is a cricket writer by love and a leading neurologist by reason. He ghosted Javed Miandad’s autobiography and writes regularly for Cricinfo, an elegant and rational voice on screen, and a loving, believing one off it. He is untouched by cynicism to the point of being a Pollyanna. In true Saad style, he kind of agreed, but saw a rosier picture.
“I see it more as self-belief and hubris, not so much denial,” he wrote back. “You could say denial if the outcome ended in failure; but here the outcome is success. Most times that self-belief is latent, but it gets triggered by some unexpected circumstance. And once triggered, it feeds on itself and explodes. I guess another way of seeing it is that this self-belief has an activation threshold, and once the threshold is met, there’s no stopping it and it goes all the way. The biological parallel would be a nerve action potential or a sexual orgasm.”
This leads to another imprecise consideration. Last year I wrote that “Pakistan lives fullest in the imagining of its own imminent death. It is at – and for – this moment that Pakistan and its citizens stir and fight and burn bright.” That article was written in context of the wider troubles afflicting country and cricket, to explain how Pakistan had managed to turn things around in arguably their darkest moments. In hindsight that could work as an explanation for these moments too.
Only when Pakistan realise that they are on the verge of losing the game do they begin to do something about not losing it. It was a point Ramiz Raja, who has lived first-hand through many such days, made to me just before the Abu Dhabi Test against England. “We don’t know how the team is coping with the logic of method,” he said. “In our times it was always up to the brilliance of certain individual players. So when you get to a desperate situation, where you know you are going to lose, when you know you are going to get killed, for example, your reflexes and body matter reacts absolutely differently.
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