We Do Have a Nuclear Device
THE BOOK I am going to talk about today has reached me two years too late mainly because of poverty and an increasing aversion to the printed word. The twentieth century has seen a proliferation of printed matter quite unprecedented in history. This is one of the chief reasons why people have lost faith in words, in themselves, and in others.
When Waqar Yunus comes live into your living room on that stupid little screen, he becomes like one of us, unlike the heroes of yesteryear like Khan Muhammad and Fazal Mahmood and Imtiaz Ahmad and such like. Romance has gone out of our lives because we can switch on the World Cup videos whenever we want and wherever we want.
The heroes of our youth were supernatural; because we saw so very little of them. And we had to go to the Bagh -i-Jinnah to watch them and even when we heard of their feats on radio, they were invisible to us and we thought they were the gods who could bowl the devil out of the attack or score at least twenty-four runs per over when the devil was bowling at them.
Had Waqar Yunus and Wasim Akram been playing in the thirties or the early forties, they would have had this advantage, the advantage of not being available on view just because you had a television set at home. Test match cricket will never see the likes of Hutton and Graveney (Tom), Bradman and Merchant , Mushtaq Ali and Mankad , Subash Gupte and Phadkar , Munnawar Ali Khan and Lindwall , and Miller and even Freddie Brown ; because we did not see too much of them of TV or none at all. At best, we used to have those British Movie tone newsreels in cinemas before the start of the main feature film.
Familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes but does it? Well, not really. There always are exceptions to the rule, and the exception in this particular instance came last Tuesday. I don't know what will be the result of the three-nation one-day to tournament but one thing is certain: The Americans are right. We do have at least one nuclear device our Government's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. This nuclear device is called WY-Waqar Yunus , and we developed it (him) a few years ago.
We are an underdeveloped country, but there is nothing underdeveloped about Waqar Yunus or you can ask the 22,000-plus crowd, which saw him explode at Durban that Tuesday. Five wickets for ten runs in his second spell and all of them clean bowled. We talk of third umpires? He didn't require even the one at the bowling end for decisions in his favour. He just used what a commentator called "rotating yorkers " to rattle the stumps, and the umpire had to keep his finger to himself.
Give Waqar Yunus what the Americans call a halfway decent score to defend and he will do it. Pakistan 's 208 against South Africa was a half way decent score and Waqar Yunus showed it could be defended. But what can he and Wasim Akram do when Pakistan gets out for 74 or 96 or 150?
That is why I think that the BCCP 's decision to sack Javed Miandad as captain was grossly bad start in Australia , what could poor Miandad do as captain? His batsman did not give him one single opportunity to prove his mettle as captain. Just imagine the Pakistan side of the seventies with Waqar and Wasim included, and Mushtaq Muhammad at the helm.
And now, just imagine, heaven forbid, Wasim or Waqar breaking down. We would be easy meat even for Zimbabwe . We just have no second line of defence. Why? Mainly because of the structure of the national tournaments. The BCCP did not create Javed Miandad or Waqar or Wasim. They created themselves all by themselves. Who the hell is interested in HBL vs. NBP or ABC vs. XYZ games?
It is mighty white of the country's financial institutions to hire players and have cricket teams of their own. Otherwise, the game might have died but the irony is that by appropriating cricketers, these institutions have taken the romance out of the game. Cricket is no longer for the amateurs because every one of us has to make a living, but a good cricketer cannot be a good banker or airline manger.
Why can't our financial institutions finance the KCA or the LCA? Or, better still, why can't regional cricket associations be self-financing? The way things are going at present; we can only depend on stray brilliance. There is no organized attempt a scouting for talent. Every once in a while a gifted individual comes along and Pakistan are on the move.
If the game is to survive, we must, as Imran Khan has so often proposed, restructure the national cricketing calendar. No one will watch HBFC play PIA even if the two sides have the services of the best cricketers at their disposal. No one is bothered whether the PIA wins or loses this trophy or that. But let there be a game between, say, Karachi and Lahore and people will, in due course, begin to get interested. And let us give our cricketers living wages so that they don't have to bother about banking and things like that. This is a subject on which one could go on and on. So, I'II keeping coming back to it from time to time.
I started by saying that I would share a book with you today. But then Waqar Yunus came in and disrupted all that. And the book was borrowed by friend Naeem Bokhari . Anyway, it is called The Parliament of Whores , written by P. J. O'Rourke. Just let me retrieve it from Bokhari and we'll talk about it.
Sunday , February 14, 1993
