What are cricket boards for?

What are cricket boards for?

There is a lot to be said for daydreaming. The world is full of tediously focused people who never take their eyes off the ball, but who wants to watch the ball when you can gaze aimlessly at the crowd, the sky, the pitch, the birds, or your own shoelaces?

Some of humanity's best brain-work came through daydreaming. Galileo hadn't given much thought to suns, orbits and suchlike, until his mind started to wander during mass one Sunday morning. Lalit Modi had no interest in franchised hyper-leagues, cheerleaders, megalomania or world domination until he found himself stuck in a Mumbai lift listening to the Lighthouse Family for 27 minutes.

Even a commoner can benefit from daydreaming. Only this week I came up with three chin-strokers while I was stuck in a conversation about illegal parking with an angry policeman.

Firstly, what's the difference between a medium-fast bowler and a fast-medium bowler? For example, in the Playfair Cricket Annuals, David Capel was always MF, but Neil Foster was FM. (Graham Gooch was SM, and by the end, Ian Botham was more VVSM.)

Secondly, why are the Army Barmy? If it's a self-help group for people with mental-health issues, then surely there are more sensitive titles. Or couldn't they be bothered to find another rhyme for Army? That's unforgivable when just ten minutes with a rhyming dictionary threw up the Balmy Army (purveyors of soothing lullabies) the Smarmy Army (supporting England in an unctuous and insincere manner), the Origami Army (adept at creating paper representations of the day's play), and the Pastrami Army (always bring their own sandwiches).

Thirdly, what are cricket boards for? Every other species of board has a purpose. Floorboards stop you from landing on the breakfast table of the family who live downstairs. Cupboards solve that tricky age-old problem of where to put your cups. Washboards make fine musical instruments. And waterboards help certain governments in their quest for global justice.

But cricket boards?

I think I know what they should do. Arrange matches for the benefit of spectators. Keep things running smoothly. Make sure players get paid on time. Steer clear of media squabbles. Maybe even work together with other boards for the good of the sport.

What they actually do is rather different. In the last week alone, we've seen the following examples of board misbehaviour: bad-mouthing senior players in the media (SLC); not paying their players (ZC); attempting to bully another cricket board over fixtures (BCCI).

The problem is that cricket boards are usually staffed with politicians, businessmen and former players. Politicians are skilled at lying, presenting things in the best possible light, and character assassination (or in some cases, literal assassination). Businessmen spend their lives persuading us to buy things we don't need, sacking people, and extracting money from every situation. And former players just want to be loved.

So our cricket boards scheme, spin, and chase after dollars with the gusto of a pack of slavering, if slightly overweight, basset hounds in pursuit of a fox. They are forever launching new franchised leagues that nobody really needs, giving us their opinions without our having asked for them, and being photographed leaving courtrooms wearing expensive suits. We have some of the most ruthless, Machiavellian, commercially minded boards in history.

But we don't want our cricket boards to be dynamic, ruthless and exciting, just as we don't want our hospitals to be dynamic, ruthless and exciting. We like our hospitals to be roughly in the same place they were yesterday, reliable, reasonably efficient at doing the thing that they are supposed to do, and largely free of flesh-eating diseases.

Cricket is crying out for the return of the old-fashioned, ego-free administrator; the pen-pusher; the bureaucrat; the man in the dull tie who will come into the office on time and do exactly the same thing he did yesterday; who will do the boring things and do them so well that we won't even know what he looks like, and our only clues to his existence will be that every cricketer gets paid on time, the fixture list has regular gaps in it, and coverage of the sport is widely and freely available for everyone.

 

The unsung micro-Botham

The unsung micro-Botham

Has a player who did not score a half-century or take three wickets in an innings ever had a greater impact on a series than Tim Bresnan on this year's Ashes? He totalled 103 runs at an average of 25 and ten wickets at fractionally under 30. Hardly numbers that explode out of the scorebook, but his performance was of enormous value.

With the bat, his turgid nightwatchman's grind at Lord's helped to snuff out Australia's microscopic hopes of coming back from the dead, then, more importantly, he played with solidity in the first innings at the Riverside, helping Graeme Swann and James Anderson add 40 precious runs for the last two wickets. His second-innings 45 - solid while supporting specialist batsmen, then punishingly aggressive with the tail - was priceless, as England's last three wickets added a match-turning 79.

With the ball, nine of his ten wickets were of top-six batsmen, including two of the first three wickets at Lord's, sparking the Australian implosion that essentially confirmed the destination of the urn, and the pivotal wicket of David Warner in Durham, just as the intermittently brilliant left-hander was on the verge of turning the game decisively Australia's way. He added the wicket of Shane Watson, leaving Brad Haddin and the tail to either (a) score 120 to win, or (b) be swept away by Stuart Broad. They chose (b). Or perhaps had (b) chosen for them by Broad.

He was statistically unspectacular but impactful. In his five Ashes Tests, two in the last series and three this time, 17 of his 21 wickets have been top-six batsmen; one more was Haddin; he has also dismissed the bowling allrounders Mitchell Johnson and Ashton Agar; his sole genuine tail-end Ashes wicket was Ben Hilfenhaus, and even that had the added glory of being the final, Ashes-confirming wicket in the MCG Test in 2010-11.

Like Ian Bell, he was emerging from a significant slump. It was aggravated by injury but two wickets for 420 in four Tests, against South Africa and in India, while conceding 3.5 runs per over, and failing to pass 20 with the bat, were hardly numbers to write home about, unless that missive was to say, "Stock up on my favourite biscuits, I won't be playing much Test cricket for a while."

The selectors trusted him to recapture his form of 2010 and 2011; Bresnan rediscovered his game. Both deserve great credit.

He is the first bowler to have taken ten or more wickets in an Ashes series without taking three in an innings, and only the third England bowler to reach double figures in any series without bagging a three-for (Flintoff took 10 at 59 in five Tests against South Africa in 2003, and Laker 11 at 29 in the five-match rubber in South Africa in 1956-57). Only four other players have scored at least 100 runs in a series at an average of 25 or higher, and taken at least ten wickets at an average of 30 or lower, without either scoring a half-century or taking four wickets in an innings. And only Bresnan has done so without even taking three in an innings. To future cricket-loving generations, he might barely be noticeable on the 2013 Ashes scorecards, but Bresnan has been England's unsung micro-Botham.

I'll be back in late September, with some thoughts on Cook's much-maligned and much-praised captaincy - I think both sides of the argument are, essentially, right. I will also, hopefully, be touring India with a cricket-and-global-politics-themed stand-up show in October. I'll keep you posted here, and on my @ZaltzCricketTwitter feed.

In the meantime, one final statistic for all those who sat through England's miserable batting on Friday and thought to themselves: "I have paid £65 for this. I wanted to see history being made." Well, you did see history being made. For the first time ever in Test history (admittedly including only games for which balls faced have been recorded), a team's top six all scored 25 or more, and all at a strike rate of less than 40 runs per 100 balls. This was not "proper Test cricket" or "a day for the connoisseur". It was unnecessary, and unparalleled, (and, I would argue, not particularly effective) collective hyper-caution.

Until late September, goodbye, all hail to the Sledgehammer of Eternal Justice and his three series-defining centuries of Dravidian silk and steel, some of the finest English batsmanship of all time.

 

The idea of Afridi

The idea of Afridi

"If you wanna hear the crowd [x2]
Screaming out your name so loud
If you wanna hear the crowd
Say...
Boom boom - Afridi"
- "Boom Boom Afridi", The Duckworth Lewis Method

It's poetic how in an age where televised cricket, and its attendant haste and excess, has become the core of how the game is viewed and played, thefastest century ever made in international cricket, the most TV-friendly innings of all time, doesn't have an iconic image associated with it, existing only in the mind, as some sort of platonic ideal of modern, consumer-friendly cricket.

It was the first time that the player in question had batted, but since then, each of the 441 times SMS Khan Afridi has walked out to bat in international cricket, all of us, and most of all him, have tried to relive that gloriously improbable memory.

While there isn't an image of that innings that defines Afridi, there are a plethora of images, ideas and imaginations of Afridi himself. It is difficult to think of a more consistently evocative player in the game, particularly when measured not in terms of perceptions of greatness but of impressions on fans. In fact, Afridi's purely cricketing abilities are almost ordinary, even embarrassing, for someone so popular.

His unprecedented ball-biting sent ad men from India to Australia into a frenzy. No other living being exists so pervasively in Pakistani advertising, simply because Afridi seems to fuel the nation's fantasies. He has even inspired a range of sporting goods. But then again, the lure of Afridi is not really just about the endorsements, is it?

In 2011, two Americans who had never known of any cricket outside the realm of entomology were given a recording of the India-Pakistan Mohali semi-final from the World Cup and asked to blog their experience of watching it. After about five hours of hilarious attempts at working out the rules and the narrative, one of them wrote: "Suddenly, out of nowhere, I am very much rooting for Pakistan. I want to see Shahid Afridi happy."

Gulshan-e-Iqbal's Golden Son has a habit of making men weak in the knees. Jarrod Kimber, who described his playing style as "an acid freak in a children's playground", has based his most erotically riotous writing on Lala. On Youtube, there is a shaky phone video of an elderly Pashtun man singing a songcomposed for Lala, in the manner previous generations would sing for their warriors. In shops across Karachi, the world's largest Pushtun city and Afridi's hometown, framed pictures of the owner with Afridi have taken on an almost totemic value. Lala lives in neon vehicular art, in spicy street slang, in gaudy SMS jokes. He is larger than life in a way few Pakistanis have ever been.

****

"Kenya ke baghaat se aayee ek saughat... Na koi laya, na koi laye" ("From the gardens of Kenya arrived a blessing... none had brought it, none ever shall") 
- lyrics from a Pakistani tea commercial

The prophetic Osman Samiuddin, writing just before Shahid Afridi embarked on the most successful spell of his 16-year career, said that the first innings Lala ever played - on that obscure ground in Kenya during a forgotten tournament - had come to "generally haunt" his career.

From 2005 till 2011 was a time when Afridi took the team to Test series wins, captained it to a semi-final, dragged it to another final, and in between won us our first major trophy in 17 years. During those resplendent years we strove to rationalise him as a cricketer, to label him as a bowler who occasionally batted, to reclaim him from the haunting image. But cricket, for all its wonder, couldn't contain the other-worldly persona it had generated for Lala, and neither could it deliver him from it. It needed something more.

****

"Tu mila, Mila sahara / Bin tere nahi guzara / Roz naye sapnay dekhanay waley / Haan Boom Boom" ("I found you, found support / Without you, I cannot cope / You, who give me new dreams each night / Oh yes, Boom Boom") 
- from Nazia Hasan's '80s pop anthem "Boom Boom"

In being the bearer of impossible expectations, Afridi the man and the cricketer paid a heavy price. But now in the twilight of his career, the legend of Boom Boom has found its new place, transcending its corporeal form

The film-maker Hasan Zaidi says it would be naive and premature to label the success of one film as the revival of Pakistani cinema. Despite much lamentation, the country's film industry, which has been in purgatory for two decades, never stopped releasing films, and even manages a hit once every few years, though Hasan maintains that "one blockbuster every three or four years does not a revival make". But despite his caution, he is among the countless many delighted by the prospects of a single film, Main Hoon Shahid Afridi (I am Shahid Afridi).

Like the man's batting, and in the grand tradition of masala films, the plot is ludicrous and predictable, and often folds over itself to provide contrived resolutions. There is unnecessary melodrama and sentimentality, and the female characters exist solely to throw masculinity into relief.

And yet in the best Boom Boom style, the film is relentlessly entertaining, running at a maniacal speed, chock-a-block with devilish charm and playful one-liners. Its handling of religion is a great example of its cheekiness - like the kiss Lala once blew Jacques Kallis. In a country where elected officials have been murdered for standing up for Christians, this film has a cross-religious buddy-story side narrative that's clumsy yet fearless. Shrewdly, the film packs a heavy dose of rich-villain-versus-poor-underdog drama, and it is loaded with cricket references ranging from Allen Stanford's chopper to Mohammad Asif being busted for drugs. Crucially, Afridi doesn't exist as a character at any point, serving instead as the basis upon which the film's fantasy takes root.

For me, as I watched the film and finally embraced the desi penchant for dancing and applauding in cinemas, it dawned upon me that we - the Boom Boom generation - had finally found a resolution for our superhero. For of course, the man, the idea, the image that has loomed for so long over our collective conscience was naturally, inevitably meant for this.

In an era of many volatile changes in Pakistan, Afridi stood as the one source of not hope, but of dreams, of fantasies, of improbabilities. In being the bearer of impossible expectations, in being the receptacle of millions of hopes, in existing as the one uniting symbol in a divided nation, Shahid Afridi the man and the cricketer paid a heavy price. But now in the twilight of his career, the legend of Boom Boom has found its new place, leaving behind its corporeal form and transcending onto celluloid.

This is Afridi as cinema.

 

Kenya down the lacklustre legends

West Indies were a shambles going into the 1996 World Cup, and the unknown amateurs of Kenya exploited that to the full in one of the game's biggest upsets

Few sides have arrived at a major tournament in such a state of disarray as West Indies did at the 1996 World Cup. Richie Richardson, the captain, was under massive pressure to quit, and consensus was he looked isolated, adrift from a side who no longer believed in him. To add to the team's problems, the headline act, Brian Lara, at times seemed to want to be anywhere other than with the team.

West Indies won their opening match against Zimbabwe, then lost against India and forfeited their game against Sri Lanka in Colombo on security grounds. The bloated structure of the tournament meant that one win in their final two matches would still be enough to see them through to the quarter-finals.

Kenya, meanwhile, in their first World Cup, only had one professional cricketer, Steve Tikolo, with the remainder all amateurs. They had lost all three games before meeting West Indies and Ladbrokes quoted odds of 50-1 on for a West Indies win and 16-1 for Kenya, although the bookmakers admitted they had not taken a single bet on the Kenyans.

Richardson won the toss and stuck Kenya in, and while Kenya slid to 81 for 6, West Indies were awful in the field. The usually ultra-reliable Roger Harper dropped two catches, and the bowlers conceded 27 wides and no-balls in all, but it looked as if their experience would win through. Although Hitesh Modi and Thomas Odoyo, at 17 the youngest player in the tournament, added 44 for the seventh wicket, aided by extras, the top scorer with 37, Kenya's 166 seemed to be well short of a defendable score.

Even so, the fragile mindset within the West Indies camp manifested itself when Wes Hall, the manager, stormed into the match referee's room during the innings to angrily demand to know why Odumbe had not been given out when he trod on his stumps.

In reply West Indies lost two early wickets but were still in a decent position, although they needed a solid innings from Lara. What they got was someone who seemed not to care. After a crisp cover drive off the first ball he faced, he played like a man in a benefit match. Within half a dozen balls Roland Holder, the 12th man, had scurried to the middle with a bottle of water and, presumably, a message for Lara to calm down. It went unheeded. He swished and missed twice more and should have been run-out in the first 10 balls.

The end was not surprising, other than for the fact an edge was held by wicketkeeper Tariq Iqbal - "bearded and bespectacled, wearing a blue headband and a double chin", noted the Guardian - who "had dropped the ball so many times before that that his own bowlers were laughing at him". So were the TV commentators. Keith Stackpole, desperately trying to remain diplomatic, remarked after an earlier drop: "For his side it was a good attempt but any wicketkeeper in the world would have taken it."

Rajab Ali bowled a decent ball outside off stump with a hint of swing and Lara aimed a massively optimistic back-foot drive and got a thick edge to Iqbal. "The ball sank somewhere into his nether regions and the gloves clutched desperately, trying to locate it," the Daily Telegraph reported. "Then, glory be, it reappeared in his hands and was raised aloft in triumph and relief."

	"I'm the captain, but the players are also responsible, the whole set-up is responsible ... we're in a very, very deep hole and we're almost at the bottom"Richie Richardson

"Our only hope of winning was to get Lara early," recalled Hanumant Singh, the former India Test player who coached Kenya. "And you could say he contributed to that end."

From there West Indies fell apart, largely because of Odumbe's 3 for 15 off 10 overs, exploiting a turning pitch, and were bowled out for 93, sliding to a humiliating 73-run defeat. The shambolic feel of their day continued when nobody could find their presentation cheque in the post-match ceremony.

"The West Indians, as if infected by their shame, hid behind the curtains of the dressing room," Michael Henderson wrote in the Times. "They have made few friends and the reason is plain. Their minds are elsewhere and they wish their bodies were. This was a disgraceful performance and the consequences will vibrate throughout the Caribbean for some time."

When they finally emerged, Richardson was clearly shell-shocked, and uttered little more than: "I have no words right now." He did go into the Kenyan dressing room, along with several other players, to offer his congratulations, and they posed for photographs with the jubilant Kenyans. "West Indies are our idols and so to beat them is a dream," Odumbe said. "We came here to prove we could play but this is like winning the World Cup."

Back in Kenya the win caused a ripple of excitement but no more, although there were parties long into the night at the hotbeds of the game, the clubs in Nairobi and Mombasa.

In the Caribbean, the media were sounding the death knells for the game in the region, and Richardson was singled out for blame. "He is the man who must ultimately pay the price and his resignation must now be properly offered to the Board in a timely manner," said an editorial in the Barbados Nation. At a coincidental meeting of heads of government in Guyana, Prime Minister Edison James of Dominica insisted that the whole state of West Indies' cricket be urgently added to the pressing political items on the agenda.

Elsewhere it was Lara who was blamed. "He threw away his wicket like a spoilt child," wrote Henderson. "Lara swiped and slashed and eventually edged to an astonished wicketkeeper," said Peter Roebuck. "He had not shown sufficient respect." Roebuck added it was part of a "pathetic and arrogant performance".

"This must be the depths for our cricket," wrote former West Indies fast bowler Colin Croft, while Michael Holding added: "I don't think we can sink lower than this."

	Martin Suji starts the rot by bowling Sherwin Campbell © Associated Press  Enlarge

The following day Richardson spoke to the media. "I would say to the West Indian public that we're very, very sorry, we're as disappointed as they are. I've never felt this bad in all my life. If things are not going well, somebody should be blamed and the people at the top are usually the ones. I'm the captain, but the players are also responsible, the whole set-up is responsible... we're in a very, very deep hole and we're almost at the bottom."

As if things could not get worse, a story broke in India's Outlook magazine claiming that immediately after the game Lara had told the Kenyans that losing to them was not as bad as losing to a team like South Africa. An unnamed source was quoted as hearing him say: "You know, this white thing comes into the picture. We can't stand losing to them."

Jonathan Barnett, Lara's agent, issued a vehement denial. "Brian may be many things, but a racist he certainly is not. I talked to him after the article was published and he is bitterly upset. All that has ever mattered to him, whether in cricket or in life, is that people conduct themselves properly. Colour has never come into his thinking. He insists that he went into the Kenyan dressing room to congratulate them on a famous win and said: 'Losing to you guys hurt badly but it wasn't the worst day of my life. The worst was losing to South Africa in the 1992 World Cup because I realised we weren't going to qualify for the semis.' Never at any stage did he mention black, white or any colour."

The next day Lara himself spoke to the media. "I have no racial preferences in sport or any aspect of life," he said. "What has happened has been a big blow to me because of the respect I have for the administrators of cricket in South Africa, for the way they are developing cricket and the whole of the new South Africa. We have a great match on our hands. Let's not try and spoil it."

What happened next?

• West Indies beat Australia to sneak into the quarter-finals, where they beat South Africa. In the semi-finals they performed one of the great one-day chokes to lose to Australia by five runs after being 165 for 2 chasing 207
• The row seemed to inspire Lara, who hammered a hundred against South Africa, although his tournament ended in controversy after he was reported for rowing with the team's fitness coach on the plane home
• Richardson announced his international retirement six days after the Kenya match, playing his last match in the semi-final defeat
• Kenya were thrashed by Sri Lanka in their final match and finished bottom of their group

Wasim Akram is not cricket's best raconteur.

Sudden threat, but a tame end to the bowler's slower one in cricket

Wasim Akram is not cricket's best raconteur. Occasionally his Punjabi wit enriches a recounting of a great memory, but usually he gives the impression that nothing he did on the field is worthy of remembering.

That is both endearing and unfulfilling, and this strange muting of the stories of his own magnificent career and the lessons it offers often drains the colour and substance from his broadcasting.

But when he does stray into technical talk is when he is a treasure. That much is evident from the immediate effects of his roaming, troubleshooting consultancy with several young bowlers. A sprinkle of knowledge here, a little there and boom: bowler transformed.

We happened to be discussing recently his development as a bowler in the late '80s, when he segued unexpectedly into how he learnt to bowl the slower ball. Akram's slower ball is not a thing of particular legend. He had too much else going on for just one delivery to stand out, though he did do Sachin Tendulkar with a beauty once in Sharjah.

But it was how he talked about it, as an offensive weapon for wicket-taking that struck me, because the slower ball these days is not a weapon. Akram first came across it in England during a county season, where the West Indian Franklyn Stephenson was employing a devastating early version of it.

Akram's first reaction to it was instructive. "I'd seen him bowl a lot of guys, getting them to duck and bowling them. This was in '89 and I thought I had to learn it, but then I thought, I am a fast bowler, why should I learn how to bowl a slower ball? So it took me two years to learn it properly."

It is instructive because, instinctively he thought of it as defensive, like an admission of weakness in a paceman, to have to resort to cutting pace. But as his thinking about bowling expanded, he began to understand its attacking potential and, like Stephenson, intuited early what makes a good slower ball.

"The key thing I learnt is that you have to toss it up, give it flight. If you throw it straight, it just skids on. The faster you run in, the shoulder should rotate as fast, but it's just the fingers and wrist. Some bowlers, when they try to bowl it, psychologically become a bit slower in their run-up, their shoulder rotation is a bit slower and batsmen read it. So you have to do the opposite – the shoulder will go around as fast, but you use the wrist to kind of twist the ball and get that dip."

This is what unites the best slower balls, this high-arcing moon-ball tendency. It is in losing the flight that any batsman becomes most vulnerable, when his calculus on receiving a ball – honed over years and years of preparatory repetition – is so disturbed that all other considerations of line, length or even pace, get scrambled. The late, sharp dip after that completes the loop batsmen hate even more.

The drop in pace is important, but secondarily. Shoaib Akhtar showed in 2005/06 against England, as Steve Harmison did one magical Edgbaston evening against Michael Clarke, that the more sudden the drop – from 95mph to 70mph, for instance – the greater the threat.

As much as the deliveries themselves, it is the batting reaction that makes the best slower balls great; Chris Cairns and Courtney Walsh making batsmen collapse in on themselves; a succession of English batsmen looking around lost, maybe for a no-ball, as Akhtar picked them off.

One of the best ever did not even get a wicket. Steve Waugh bowled one to Viv Richards at the Gabba Test in 1988/89, which looped high but dipped so much that it struck a ducking Richards on the shoulder. The lbw appeal, turned down, looked good, but in making the great Richards look a bit foolish was a little victory.

And so one of the most annoying by-products of limited overs cricket generally and Twenty20 specifically is that the magic of a really good slower ball has worn off. Fifty-over cricket did initially help to enhance it and Waugh and Simon O'Donnell were beautiful pioneers in their own way.

It was still rare enough to be a spontaneous plan, as Aaqib Javed's delicious off-break to dismiss New Zealand's Mark Greatbatch in the 1992 World Cup semi-final was; Aaqib only decided upon it halfway through his run-up.

But Twenty20 has propelled its ubiquity so much that it is no longer primarily a wicket-taking attempt. The variety of the genre has actually blossomed. There are different grips, different trajectories, subtler changes in pace, but by and large, there is only one purpose behind them: to prevent runs.

Batsmen are probably better prepared to pick them, but Akram's warning that without thought and effort it loses potency, seems an equal explanation. To be unkind would be to call this the Dernbach-isation of the slower ball, because though Jade Dernbach has a decent collection, he epitomises the new-age deployment of the slower ball, delivered by rote, not inspiration.

“They always wanted me to fail” Faisal Iqbal

“They always wanted me to fail”

 

It was at the C.C.C nets behind Nishat cinema when I saw Javed Miandad’s nephew for the first time. The 13-year-old boy rode on the reputation of his maternal uncle. He seemed to possess talent but so did others, though, what made him exceptional were the genes of the greatest batting icon Pakistan had ever produced. Due to his pedigree, Faisal Iqbal was special from day one.

The first major opportunity that came for boys his age was the 1996 U15 World Cup. Extensive trials were held across all provinces and the team selected showcased some of the best adolescent talent in the country.

Taufeeq Umar, Yasir Arafat, Kamran Akmal and Shoaib Malik came through the talent hunt while Bazid Khan s/o Majid Khan and Imran Qadir s/o Abdul Qadir also made it to the fray. From Karachi emerged the highly gifted Hasan Raza and team captain Faisal Iqbal. At first glance, Faisal appeared to be an astute leader with a good cricketing brain. The young team performed well, but eventually lost in the final at Lords to arch rivals, India.

From an early age kids understand how the parchee (recommendation) system works in Pakistan and embrace the dynamics of provincial and personal biases, it is an integral part of cricket’s sociopolitical culture that stretches across all levels of the sport in the country. The Pakistani youth is cultivated in this environment, while some manipulate and benefit from the prevalent climate, others just learn to live under it without much choice.

Faisal always came across as a bloke who had gotten a head start.

On his debut in New Zealand at the age of 19 he met with immediate success, scoring 42 in the first innings and 52 not out in the second. He followed that up with a 63 in his next innings but more importantly he had spent almost 10 hours at the crease in his first three Test innings, showing stomach for the big stage.

His dream start in international cricket did not last very long as his average quickly fell below par. Yet, he remained on the fringes of national selection through domestic success. Though, given his lineage, one usually assumed nepotism.

 

When there is a tough series, Faisal goes to bat at three. When there is an easy series, Faisal is the 12th man. It has always been this way.

He averaged in the mid twenties yet made it to the squad regularly. He appeared as excess baggage that Pakistan carried around, usually only sighted on tour at short leg or carrying drinks. It is baffling that he has been on the squad for most part of the last decade, but has played only 26 games.

With a decent young crop of middle-order batsmen recently unearthed in Pakistan, why do we still see Faisal’s name on the squad? If he was getting special treatment, why wasn’t he getting any games? His consistent selection and even more consistently being kept on the back burner displays an odd strategy adopted by Pakistan cricket, that is, if they have any.

So what’s Faisal’s side of the story? The 31-year-old batsmen tells all in an exclusive interview with Dawn.com

Hi Faisal, I hope it is not too late for you?

FI: Its 1:30 in the morning (in Lahore) but it is okay. When I am going on an assignment I try to adjust my biological clock according to the country I am touring. (It was 10:30 pm in Harare, Zimbabwe)

It is a very short tour with back to back games.

FI: Yes, that is how cricket has become. (For Pakistan)

You have been in and out of the team for almost 13 years; it’s a long time.

FI: The only reason I have been able to survive in this set up is my mental strength. I have put my head down and kept scoring in domestic cricket to keep my career alive. (Scoring 15,000 runs averaging over 40 in first class and List-A cricket)

Do you think you have done justice to your talent?

FI: Since I have made my debut, I have been kept as a replacement player. Usually been given single games in between long gaps; sometimes one game in 12 months. Plus, they played me at different batting positions all the time, how is a player meant to perform or settle? (Played in positions 3,4,5,6 and 7 in 26 games)

Why do you think you have not been given an extended run in the team?

FI: It has been a 99.9 % disadvantage in my career to be the nephew of Javed Miandad. There has been a lobby that has been against him from his playing and then his coaching days and continues to be so. I have just been an easy target and have gotten caught in political cross fire.

But there is a public perception that Faisal is selected because of Javed Miandad.

FI: Public follows the direction of the wind and maybe do not know that the poor guy has scored up to the throat in domestic cricket so he can be selected. I have been labeled all my life and it’s a tag difficult to get rid of. (Branding)

Does being from Karachi also affect you?

FI: Ninety per cent being Miandad’s nephew and 10% being from Karachi. Historically, every player from Karachi is affected, you know how it is, this is normal. (The provincial bias)

In so many years of international cricket, which has been your favourite innings?

FI: Surely the one against India, it was in Karachi and my century helped Pakistan win the Test match and the series, it is what is most important, for the team to win. It was also my comeback game after a break of three years. (His comeback ended during the series in England, his return lasted only eleven innings; 139, 2, 60, 5, 0, 48, 3, 29, 0, 11 and 58*)

My personal favourite was the courageous one against Australia, or Shane Warne rather.