The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV.
The royal mess in (men’s) cricket has deeply injured national sentiment. Visit any part of social media and an outpouring of anguish and anger confronts you. Read any column, editorial comment or watch talk shows, and there is mourning and brutal critique of the flailing eleven. Parliamentarians, judges, actors and social workers – besides others – have national flags flying half-mast. There is a pervasive feeling of being let-down by a bunch that craves all the attention, has all the resources, but refuses to measure up to the task.
But the disaster in national cricket isn’t something that is out of the ordinary. Seen dispassionately, it is a mirror image of the debilitating state of most institutions in the country. More importantly, the sorry antics of the national team and their disgraceful exit from the T-20 world cup hold a magnifying glass onto those aspects of the national psyche that promote underperformers, build unreasonable expectations and set us all up for emotional distress and collective dejection. In other words, cricket blues are self-invited; the game’s consistent (but reversible) decline has a national context that we cannot turn our faces away from.
One outstanding feature of this context is our obsession with the ‘individual’. There is a longstanding tendency to believe that somehow all our ailments can be cured by a superman, who has the salve and the resolve to pull us out of our misery. That no such individual exists who has a master key to the total salvation we seek does not register with us.
We remain in lalaland, keep on counting on ‘Lala’ to live up to the legend in our hearts and take us to the target. That Lala has no proven capacity to deliver the services we want is never an issue. We want to believe that he can. The tension between the power of (false) belief and reality is finally resolved when Lala does what he does best: chops himself into pieces and walks off the ground acting like a desperate but well-meaning hero leaving behind broken hearts and eyes crying oceans.
Unlike other nations, which learn quickly that the one saviour they seek isn’t there and counting on his reported power is a waste of time, we insist on making the same mistake over and over again.
The fact that Shahid Afridi had no ability to lead the side in an intelligent way did not require much investigation. His limited cricketing abilities in the twilight of his career couldn’t have done the trick most of us wanted him to do in the field. And yet he was put on the pedestal where even the more qualified would have flipped and failed because of the intensely competitive nature of the game. Match after match the nation clung to the tenuous hope that he would wield his bat and, hey presto, the difficult run-chase would become easy pickings. Match after match these hopes were dashed.
Even though most knew that he was not a thinking captain – you need to be a thinking player to be a thinking captain – because we worship the individual, therefore all such apprehensions were cast aside to raise yet another sand castle. Most teams would have had the likes of Shahid Afridi retire a long time ago. But not us. We had to suffer utter humiliation and bear the cost of not even qualifying for the semis in an international tournament to even consider that the man was not fit for the job. Why? Because we love the individual!
A corollary of this individual-worshipping is the dangerous assumption that all those in whom the nation reposes its trust are actually as committed to the assigned task as we think they ought to be. Even in the worst cases of failures, our seething anger does not translate into a determined effort to hold those in charge accountable for their poor output. We never realise that someone wrapped up in the national colour could be a total jerk, absolutely oblivious to his or her national duty and serving only personal interest.
Needless to say, absence of accountability – be that in cricket or in politics, governance and security – allows individuals to build gang-like control of the system. Using their power and privilege they build such a force of manipulation that all belated efforts that aim to put them in the dock are blunted at source. Out of their patent failures they build images of martyrdom. Instead of presenting themselves for audit and accepting responsibility, these worshipped individuals play victims, gaining national sympathy that seems to be in free supply because nobody focuses on data, nor pays attention to details of events.
The ultimate sympathy-gainer is of course national interest – a phrase that is expected to wash all dirty spots and turn recidivists and sinners into reformers and saints overnight. It was not without reason that Shahid Afridi, who at the beginning of the tournament was trying to cosy up to the Indian media by speaking of ‘Indian love’ for him, increasingly remembered Kashmiris as he hurtled down the exit door. This was an echo of tactics politicians keep handy.
Recall Mustafa Kamal’s press conference and his justification for using a fragment of the national anthem as his party name and his proposition that the national flag could be his party flag. His assumption is that by using excessive nationalistic rhetoric he, and others with him, can glide past a sordid past and start anew without having to pay for all the years spent in the service of Altaf Hussain.
But the most fantastic aspect of it all is that these tricks do work. Since our national memory has no space for archives older than a few days, anyone can pop up anywhere and claim to have seen the light and we will fall for it. Moreover, there is such desperation for seeing things change quickly that any confident idiot can insist on having the magical wand, and use the media to attract genuine support and sympathy. It is no different from suffering humanity thronging fake pirs and hoping that chariots of deceit can carry them to a healthy life.
So here we are then, looking at the dismal national cricket scene that has been shaped by our own tendencies and practices. It is truly a summary of our world-view that relies on individuals than institutions and prefers comfortable but false beliefs to confronting hard facts in building hopes for a better tomorrow. Of course, this is not a permanent malaise. It can be reversed. Other nations have done it. Look at New Zealand – a country five times smaller than Karachi. Look at their commitment, their performance, their one-for-all-all-for-one approach. They too were down in the dumps once but have since risen from the bottom to the top by killing the culture of individualism. They have held players with dubious pasts accountable and have not allowed one or two persons to define the future of national talent. We too can do it – provided we change our focus from persons to institutions.
Teams are like nations. They prosper and progress when they are freed from the stranglehold of individual whims and caprices. Whether it is cricket or politics or other matters of national life, we shall have little to cheer as long as we don’t take the normal route to reform that others have with tremendous success.
To do otherwise is to remain hostage to exploitative individuals and the mafias that support and sustain them. Pakistan is an exceptional country with exceptional talent but to say so is pointless if the wisdom of the real world is not allowed to shape our world-view. We are out of the T-20 World Cup – doesn’t matter. If only we could draw the right lessons from our exit and get down to serious reform, we would not be sorry for this loss.
Email: syedtalathussaingmail.com
Twitter: TalatHussain12