Herald Talking Points

Saeed Ajmal’s recent suspension from international cricket on suspect bowling action is not the first time the team has been in the news for the wrong reasons.

In fact, in Pakistan, controversy and cricket go way back. From the scuffle between the cricket board and players in the 1970s to the reckless, party-boy attitude of the players since the 1980s; from the infamous fixing scandals in the 1990s to the influx of extremist religious sentiments of the early 2000s, the history of our cricket team has been rife with scandals.

The Herald asked a number of writers, bloggers and commentators to pinpoint the controversy that did the greatest damage to cricket in Pakistan.

When terrorists attacked

Jarrod Kimber

Sport can’t overcome bullets. —AFP

When blood is spilt on a cricket field, there is that awkward intake of breath, a communal grimace as the super slow-motion replay show the ball taking its pint of blood. But those same fans are also there for blood — for the chance of it, if not the reality of it. It’s part of the game, this potential for danger. It draws us in. It makes cricket not just an artistic endeavour, but also a gladiatorial battle for survival.

Twelve gunmen were hiding near Liberty market square in Lahore; they aimed for the tires, while their rocket missed the bus entirely. A grenade also didn’t work. But the tyres were flat and the bus could be driven only so far by the hero Mehar Mohammad Khalil. Eight people died, six were injured. And ever since then, Pakistan cricket has been the bus with flat tyres.

Sport can overcome fixing, sport can overcome political interference. Sport can’t overcome bullets. It shouldn’t even have to. Pakistanis are now essentially in a witness relocation programme. They are being hidden from the terrorists, but also their fans. They can’t grow, they can’t inspire, and they play in empty stadiums. Their board can’t fully fund their game. And while cricket in Pakistan won’t be fixed by the sudden move back home, it can’t look to fix itself on the outside while being homeless and poor.

The true tragedy was the death of those involved. The open wound is Pakistan cricket ever since.

Jarrod Kimber is a cricket writer and founder of the blog cricketwithballs.

When the hosts failed

Saad Shafqat

Former PCB chairman Ijaz Butt. —AFP

Over the decades, Pakistan cricket has been the victim of numerous scandals and controversies — infighting within the team, disputes between the players and the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), the board’s own tortured history of incompetence, allegations of faulty bowling action, charges of ball-tampering, and of course the shameful instances of match-fixing and spot-fixing. In addition, there have been bitter player-umpire disputes, exemplified by the infamous row at Faisalabad in 1987 between Mike Gatting and Shakoor Rana, and even more dramatically by the forfeited Oval Test of 2006.

Yet none of these match the ugliness of the terror attack on the visiting Sri Lankan team in Lahore on March 9, 2009. We were the host cricketing nation and we failed our guests miserably that day. The bus carrying the Sri Lankan visitors came under heavy gunfire from militants and a rocket fired at the bus missed the fuel tank by inches. These pernicious realities make this particular tragedy the worst scandal not just for Pakistan cricket, but for world cricket as a whole. In a cricketing context, nothing worse has ever happened anywhere else. Indeed, it is one of the most shameful moments in the entire global history of sports.

The destructive consequences – direct as well as indirect – are before us. Pakistan has been eliminated as a venue from the international cricket calendar. In the absence of a home base, fans are disoriented and the team’s nomadic lifestyle has eroded morale and performance. Although the alternate United Arab Emirates venues are a great blessing in this difficult hour, they are still no substitute for an authentic home location.

Security has a lot to do with perceptions. Even if we are able to completely crush the ongoing terrorist insurgency in the country, it will still take several years of uninterrupted peace for the security perception to improve.

Saad Shafqat is a cricket enthusiast and head of the neurology department at Aga Khan University.

When players proved corrupt

Kamran Abbasi

The spot-fixing scandal shook the core of Pakistan cricket. —AFP

Pakistan cricket reached its peak with the 1992 World Cup victory, which followed a decade of success in test and one-day cricket. If Pakistan wasn’t the world’s number one team, it was close, and the rest of the 1990s was an opportunity to reach the summit. Imran Khan left Pakistan with probably the most talented collection of players in its history. Wasim Akram was groomed as the next leader. Yes, the 1990s delivered thrills and many glory days but there was a clear sense of underachievement, of talent betrayed.

Why did this happen? Was it simply a return of the maladministration and infighting that Khan had kept a lid on? Of course, that was part of the explanation. But the 1990s were full of rumours of match-fixing and when in 1998 Rafiq Tarar appointed Justice Malik Qayyum to conduct a judicial inquiry, it seemed we might find a more concrete explanation. The Qayyum Report was published in 2000, by which time Pervez Musharraf was President of Pakistan and Patron of the Pakistan Cricket Board.

The Qayyum inquiry was thorough to the extent that it interviewed all and sundry, covered every match and incident. The horror of corruption in Pakistan cricket was exposed. Players had underperformed for money and sold out their nation. This was a surprise, not because these disreputable events occurred but because a Pakistani judicial inquiry was willing to reveal them to the world. This was something to be proud of. What happened next wasn’t. Only Saleem Malik and Ataur Rehman were found guilty and punished. A series of great players, including Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Inzamamul Haq, Saeed Anwar and Mushtaq Ahmed had their characters called into question, their careers criticised, but were allowed to continue playing, some albeit with sanctions.

Qayyum was presumably influenced by his political backers but the verdict was the worst of both worlds. Pakistan’s cricket culture was damned as corrupt. Yet the snake’s venom was not sucked out; the diseased limb wasn’t amputated. The sick patient of Pakistan cricket struggled on, feverish and limping. It has never recovered, losing more top players to corruption in 2010. The Qayyum inquiry needed to herald a complete break from the past, a demonstration that corrupt practices would not be tolerated. Instead the message was that some names would always be outside the law. It was no good for the cricketers either, who played on with a stain on their reputations when a clear judgment was required. In Qayyum’s court of inquiry, the verdict for the leading players was neither guilty nor innocent. It was an unsatisfactory halfway house of part-blame and part-exoneration.

Fighting corruption is painful and may cause short-term damage but it is necessary for the long-term health of any organisation. Pakistan cricket had an opportunity to lay the foundations for a stronger future and set an example for the rest of the country to follow. Qayyum and his political masters failed where they thought they had succeeded. Pakistan cricket has been suffering ever since.

Kamran Abbasi is a cricket writer and international editor of The BMJ (British Medical Journal).

When the authority lost power

Osman Samiuddin

PCB chairman with Abdul Hafeez Kardar with Primer Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. — Photo courtesy 'Wounded Tiger'

In many ways, every single modern-day controversy involving player or board or both can trace its roots back to the events of late 1976 and the following year. The pay dispute that erupted between a group of superstar players, led by Mushtaq Mohammad and the board head, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, upended the very edifice on which Pakistan cricket was hitherto run.

In short, six to eight increasingly emboldened players threatened to not play (specifically a Test against New Zealand in Hyderabad in October 1976) unless new pay terms were negotiated. The fight was a broader one, between the amateur era and the coming professional one.

The players eventually won, but so disruptive and emotive an issue did it become that Abdul Hafiz Pirzada – then sports minister – got involved, at the prompting of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Kardar, embittered, was eventually replaced as the board chairman.

Thereafter, it came to be that the cricketer and not the administrator held all the aces in life. Once he became a professional and forces around him propelled him to celebrity status, nothing could stop him. He instigated revolts against captains, got into regular scraps with other players and, generally, remained out of the control of its main employer, the board.

The board meanwhile withered away, never recovering from that blow to its authority, realising it was no longer in control. Now and again, it tried to reassert its power over the player, but to no lasting effect. That upturned equation underpins the new order.

Osman Samiuddin is a sports writer at The National, an Abu Dhabi-based daily newspaper.