It is now time to talk of really
important things. Cricket! Pakistan has won the first test match against South Africa. Everybody who cared to comment was sure that Pakistan will do poorly. And that the Pakistan team will fold at the first chance and perhaps even successfully snatch ‘defeat from the jaws of victory’. But what this match proved was that even when everybody believes that Pakistan cannot win except by some wild chance, Misbah’s ‘boys’ suddenly put on a smashing good show. Here I must tell my readers that I have no idea which way an ‘in-swinger’ swings and what side of the batsman is the ‘off’ or the ‘on’ side. That said, watching Pakistan play cricket is quite like watching Pakistani politicians play politics.
Everybody is enthralled by the short forms of One Day or T20 cricket, but for me it was always test matches that prove how good a team really is. I like test matches for two reasons. First and the most obvious reason is that it proves whether a particular team has the ‘staying power’ to last the entire match. The other reason I like test matches is that you can watch five days of cricket on TV and, at the same time, do a lot of other things.
Reminds me of an old joke about cricket. A Frenchman visiting England told his Brit friend that he wanted to watch a cricket match. The Brit said, “So why don’t you come over this Sunday and watch a match.” But the Brit also said, “Bring along a folding chair, you will get tired standing, bring along an umbrella, it might get too sunny or start raining and yes, bring along a good book to read, it might get a bit boring.” Boring is good. What that means is that neither team is doing too well or too badly. And that is how I like my politics. Yes, as an op-ed writer I want to have something new and exciting to write about every week but as a Pakistani, I want politics to be boring.
More than 40 years ago when I arrived in the US for my medical training, baseball was the only game that came close to cricket. Often working 24-hour ‘on call’ shifts, Sunday, working or not was often a slow day. And I could sit down, do The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle and watch an afternoon baseball game on TV. Those were the days when daytime baseball was still around. This was before the time I figured out what the ‘infield popup out’ was all about. Of course, I also started enjoying American football.
About American football, before I arrived in the US, watching an English movie in Lahore was great fun, but before the movie, the cinemas would play short news clips, often from the US. In these clips they occasionally showed small parts of major US football games and what I later on learnt was called the ‘Super Bowl’. I often wondered what sort of a game it was where all these burly young men would stand up around a ball, all would then suddenly jump up, smash into each other and then all would fall down! During my years in the US I figured out that American football is very much like ‘speed’ chess. But more about that another time.
So back to the similarities between Pakistani cricket teams and their performance and the performance of Pakistani politicians. Frankly, politics and governance is not like a T20 game of cricket but like a test match. Five days of a test match is similar to five years of an elected government. If a team is still batting at the end of five days that means the match is either won or else ended in a draw. The tenure of the first elected government in post-army rule that survived five years suggests the same. Yes, it was ugly and there were times when ‘observers’ were sure that the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government was going to collapse but it did not. Corruption (match fixing?) charges were everywhere but like the ‘tuk-tuk’ Misbah, Zardari kept going. Of course, in Pakistan, our elected politicians play against the army, who in Pakistani politics are like South Africa, the number one test team around. And even getting a ‘draw’ against them must count as a victory.
Now to push the cricket analogy a bit further, Asif Zardari and his PPP lost to Nawaz Sharif and his Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N). Sindh lost, Punjab won. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa it was Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) that came out ahead. So now we have an interesting situation. The two new ‘leaders’ in Pakistan are a former cricketing hero and a former cricketer wannabe. And soon the former ‘champions’ will also get some new top layers. The match will be between Sharif and his old nemesis, the army. Khan is waiting in the wings to see if Sharif stumbles and the ‘divine selectors’ give him a chance to become captain. Zardari is back in the pavilion happy to at least come out the victor in his local championship.
Also, representing modern technology in umpiring, we have an activist Supreme Court. So, in some ways this test match is going to be a bit different from the previous one. We have a stronger team at least on paper, headed by Sharif and which includes many former teammates from the times when he kept losing the short form matches. But this time around he does have ‘umpires’ that are more inclined to favour him and his opposing team still does not have its player roster completed. Eventually, the army will have its new leadership in place and the match will start in earnest. So the big question is does Sharif have the staying power or will his team collapse as it did in the past?
The writer has practised and taught medicine in the US. He can be reached at [email protected]