Imran Yusuf enjoys a giggle as the Pakistan team makes it through to the Super8s.

When The Netherlands collapsed to 61-5, I knew we'd won. I knew I could relax. I could even allow myself some light relief.

Afridi had taken the fifth wicket and the beaten Dutchman walked off. His name appeared on the screen alongside his pitiful score: de Grooth. I was watching with my cousin and we both looked at each other, smiled, and then let out an uproarious belly laugh. This was followed by absurd elongations of the two o’s in his name as we extended the ‘ew’ sound to epic lengths.

Ok, ‘de Grooth.’ In terms of wit it’s not exactly up there with Woody Allen or Oscar Wilde, but for some reason just seeing the name was funny at the time. The next man in lasted two balls before Afridi sent him back as well. This one was even better: van Bunge. Hilarious, I know.

The things we laugh at, and the way we laugh, is more revealing than anything else we do. It pierces to the core of who we are, how we think, and how we’re feeling at the time.

The laughing seemed to say, ‘How could we ever have doubted we’d beat a team whose players have such funny names?’ (I say this in full knowledge that, to the Dutch, names like Saeed Ajmal and Sohail Tanvir - to say nothing of Yasir Arafat - might have them choking on their edam with laughter.)

More than this, the childish laughter of my cousin and myself was an expression of relief: both that our team were going through, and, more broadly, if I’m not putting too fine a point on it, that life is, on balance, alright. The sport had provided joy and lifted the spirits. That is its primary function, lest we forget.

But we do forget. The majority of responses to my previous blog centred on Younus Khan’s comment that Twenty20 cricket was just a bit of fun. I myself had lambasted him for being so casual. But on reflection, I find myself being won over to Younus’s side.

I sense that Younus - born in Mardan - feels this way about all cricket. He’s an admirable professional, especially as a test batsman, but one senses that he knows this is all just a game and that come the close of play, nobody will have died. Captaining the team during the Sri Lanka bus attack will have confirmed this to him.

It's striking that at the exact time Ajmal and Afridi were deliciously teasing out the Dutchmen, bamboozling them with doosras and flippers and drifters and sometimes just quick straight balls, the militants who bombed the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar were applying finishing touches to their explosive devices.

I was in London in 2005 when the city was awarded the Olympics for 2012. The Olympics: the sporting occasion which celebrates, more than any other, the world coming together to push the boundaries of excellence. At the same time, four young men were readying their rucksack bombs. The next day they blew themselves up on the Underground as the city made its way to work.

Afridi and Ajmal's slow, spinning strangulation of virtually the entire Netherlands team, and my anarchic joy at reading some of Dutch names, ultimately expresses the best of cricket: that it is playful and, at the end of the day, meaningless. Those who live with too much fanaticism and too little humour will never understand this, which only heightens our bafflement at their perspective - and their hatred of us.

I write all this knowing that perhaps I wouldn’t be so balanced, amused and reflective if we’d lost yesterday. Perhaps I would have written that life is terrible, Pakistan as a nation has no hope, and Younus Khan should be replaced quicker than I can say 'van Bunge.' Who knows what I would have written? The point is we’re in the Super 8s, heading onwards and upwards, and life is, on balance, alright. So then, back to the monkeying around. All together now, ‘de Grooooooth....’