Pakistan’s cricket no longer arouses strong passions on and off the ground. Betting, match-fixing and infighting, coupled with reckless administrative power-plays and dirty politics, have sapped the morale and credibility of the players. Nothing demonstrates this more than the bitter fact that no less than five current players have either captained the team in the recent past or harbour ambitions to lead the team in the future. How do we rebuild a team which does the nation proud?
Typically, Pakistan has turned the match-fixing scandal into a national dilemma. The Board of Cricket Control in Pakistan (BCCP) bowed to a groundswell of public opinion and vowed to punish the match-fixing players, only to be whiplashed by a change of mind in Islamabad. The new president of the BCCP, Mr Khalid Mehmood, is clearly not in favour of punishing the cricketers. In the event, the BCCP has thought fit to announce Wasim Akram as captain till the World Cup, despite the fact that a judicial commission headed by Justice Abdul Qayyum has yet to conclude its investigations into the match-fixing allegations against key players, including Akram. This is obviously an attempt by the BCCP to forestall any conviction of Akram by the judicial commission.
Worse, the Commission is uncertain about how to deal with public opinion which remains as fickle as ever. Court hearings have wilted in the face of a late swing of opinion in favour of the offending cricketers; witness have gone back on written affidavits, and team members upon whom the BCCP was expected to rely for evidence are quarrelling with the BCCP. The characteristic upshot is that the very officials who thought they had licked the vice of match-fixing are on the chopping block. This is problem-solving Pakistani style. In contrast, two bribe-taking cricketers in Australia have been duly punished by the Australian Cricket Board while in India the whistle-blowing cricketer Manoj Prabakar has been kicked out of the team.
The current crisis is coeval with the rise of cricket in Pakistan. Pakistan’s first great cricket captain, Abdul Hafeez Kardar, was player, captain, manager and administrator, all rolled into one. After his exist, the team tottered and fell prey to indiscipline while the BCCP helplessly looked on like a liveried servant. The next great captain, Imran Khan, sent the nascent authority of the BCCP into a nose-dive as his own authority and success expanded in tandem with his popularity among the Pakistani masses. (Remember the Col Rafi Naseem episode?) All this was in marked contrast elsewhere — great players like Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev were not allowed to undermine the Indian Board of Cricket Control which has retained its unflagging authority over its cricketers. In Pakistan, however, the struggle between the towering persona of the national cricketer versus the institution of cricket authority continues to be won by the cricketer. Indeed, Pakistani captains are wont to make public statements against the national selection committee and get away with it.
There are, of course, other problems ancillary to the development of domestic cricket in Pakistan. As opposed to India, for example, Pakistan has not demonstrated any serious interest in developing grassroots cricket. Nor has the game been allowed to develop a regional outlook necessary for the inculcation of a fierce combativeness integral to sport. Instead, it has been usurped by state sector corporations who are content to dole out jobs to promising players. The cities have suffered as a result, their playing associations ambushed by wheeler-dealers and blackmailers. Today, the Lahore and Karachi cricket associations have no cricketers to speak of an are often manned by individuals of seedy reputation. In contrast, Bombay, Delhi, Madras and Banglore are strong cricketing centres represented by good local organisations. In the process of this degradation of the game as a job-seeking enterprise in Pakistan, cricket has descended from being a game with strict rules of decorum to becoming a strong-hold of youngsters given to charas-smoking, betting and crude sexual misconduct. The decline of the BCCP as a disciplinary body in these circumstances has compounded the crisis.
The dilemma is familiar. The institution of cricket has collapsed like other institutions in the country because there is no accountability. The match-fixing, crisis could have been handled by the BCCP in the same vein as the scandals in India and Australia have been handled by their Boards — by punishing the best and most popular players in the team without endangering their careers. But it wasn’t.
The immediate need is to revive the authority of the renamed Pakistan Cricket Board (note the disavowal of ‘control’) by putting professionals in charge of it and changing its rules so that the government and its bureaucracy keep their dirty hands out of its domain. An example must also be set by punishing cricketers against whom evidence of gambling is incontrovertible, even if this means that we cannot assemble the most talented team possible for the forthcoming tout of India this month (which must go ahead) or the World Cup later in the summer. A more professional approach is sure to yield better dividends in the medium and long term than an opportunist one in the short-term.