Shadows Across the Playing Field Read online

  Pakistan Ascendant

  Asif Iqbal was not the only casualty of the Pakistani failure in India. Sadiq Mohammed also retired, Mushtaq flirted with a comeback but was overlooked, and Zaheer was passed over for the captaincy precisely because his failure in the one country that mattered was deemed an overwhelming disqualification. Heads also rolled at the Board of Control for Cricket in Pakistan: a new chief, retired Air Marshal Nur Khan, a non-nonsense military figure, was appointed. One of his first decisions was to make Javed Miandad, one of the few undisputed successes of the tour, captain of Pakistan for a brief, controversial and ultimately calamitous tenure.

  It was three years before the subcontinental rivals met again. By this time the Miandad era, marked by rancorous disputes and revolts by senior players refusing to play under him, had given way to a wholly different kind of figure. As of the English summer of 1982, Imran Khan was captain. He was everything Miandad was not: an Oxford Blue, not a hard-swearing street fighter; a glamorous, articulate spokesman rather than a glowering, tongue-tied stalwart; a laid-back, self-confident commander rather than a feisty, mercurial scrapper. Imran was cool where Miandad was hot. It was just the change that Pakistan needed.

  The peace process between India and Pakistan was at its peak when the series of tours resumed with the Indian visit of 1982- 83. Indira Gandhi was back in power in India, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence was lending covert support to the Sikh secessionist Khalistan movement in Indian Punjab, but General Zia was still publicly committed to good neighbourly relations with New Delhi, and there was never any doubt that the third test series between the two countries in five years would proceed in a positive atmosphere. Imran was clear in his objective: prepare fast, pacefriendly wickets, and blast the fabled Indian batting line-up out of their creases. He had no doubt who would be Pakistan’s fast-bowling spearhead in this endeavour: it would be the captain himself.

  Imran did not let Pakistan down. He took forty wickets in the six-Test series, leaving a shell-shocked India in the dust. The back troubles that had afflicted him during the ill-fated Indian tour were nowhere in sight. This was an athlete at the height of his powers. His Indian rival, Kapil Dev, whom the Pakistani press judged had eclipsed him three years earlier, managed 24 wickets this time, but in the face of Imran’s onslaught, he emerged a distinct second-best.

  The Indian captain, Sunil Gavaskar, experienced something of what Asif Iqbal had gone through in India. Though he averaged 45, he was more or less alone on the burning deck for much of the series, accompanied only by the doughty veteran Mohinder Amarnath, who scored three centuries, on each occasion saving a test match for India. But there were six matches, and India lost the other three, at Karachi, Hyderabad and Faisalabad, by comprehensive margins. Three Pakistani batsmen (Zaheer, Mudassar and Miandad) averaged over 100, and a fourth, Mohsin Khan, came close, completing 1000 runs in the calendar year, the first Pakistani ever to do so. So dominant were the Pakistani batsmen that the runs amassed in the series by Mudassar (761), Zaheer (650) and Miandad (594) constituted the world record for the three top-scoring batsmen in any Test series in the history of cricket. Of the two batsmen whom Pakistan had felt obliged to drop from the team in the final test of the previous series, Mudassar scored four Test centuries and Zaheer three, and the pair did almost as well in the ODIs. Imran and Sarfraz blasted all before them with the new ball. The Indians, by contrast, dropped almost every catch that came their way, and with the exception of Kapil, did not know where to put the ball before seeing it routinely despatched to the boundary. Kapil’s opening bowling partner, Madan Lal, had to return home midway through the tour with a bruised heel, and the side found itself relying, oddly, on three left-arm spinners, who found the wickets (and the umpiring) uncongenial. It was, to put it politely, a mismatch of colossal proportions.

  After the first Test, at Lahore, was drawn, Pakistan won the next three, Imran becoming the first Pakistani bowler to capture 200 wickets when he uprooted Viswanath’s middle stump at Karachi. He added an 11-wicket haul to his tally in the third Test at Faisalabad, despite another Gavaskar century, and a blistering five wickets for 3 runs in the fourth at Hyderabad, after Mudassar (231) and Miandad (280 not out) had put on a world record 451 for the third wicket. (The 280 not out did not have a happy ending: Miandad was miffed at Imran’s declaration at that point, believing that he had a good chance of cracking the then world record individual score of 365 made by Gary Sobers against Pakistan in 1958 if he had only been allowed to continue to flay the ineffectual Indian bowling.) The final two tests were drawn, not without some assistance from the weather. In Karachi, the afternoon of the fourth day’s play was abandoned due to politically motivated rioting, including an attempt to damage the pitch (which, in the event, was not harmed, and proved excessively helpful to the batsmen of both sides). But in the process of decimating India to the tune of 40 wickets, Imran aggravated a sore shin that destroyed his ability to bowl effectively for the next two years. He continued playing as captain and batsman, but for two years could not pull his weight as an all-rounder. The great rival had been conquered, but at a terrible price for Imran, and for Pakistani cricket.

  Despite the unquestionable disparity between the performances of the two teams, Pakistan’s triumph at home was once more vitiated by the umpiring, which can only be charitably described as appalling. The Maharaja of Baroda, back again as manager, was sufficiently perturbed midway through the series as to comment publicly on the inadequacies of the local umpires, inevitably provoking a public outcry in Pakistan that threatened to derail the tour. Matters were only defused when skipper Gavaskar, taking literally the old definition of a diplomat as an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country, issued a statement expressing his team’s confidence in the Pakistani umpiring. There was little else that he could do, though privately he, like the rest of the touring party, was seething. The irony was that this Pakistani team did not need sympathetic umpiring to succeed. The biases ingrained in the Pakistani umpiring tradition, while once helpful for a fledgling cricketing nation, were now undermining the hard-earned reputation for excellence of the players themselves.

  Too Much of a Good Thing

  The two boards, encouraged by the generally warm reception given to the tourists on either side of the border, decided to start an annual exchange of cricketing visits between them, the principle seemingly being that one can never have too much of a good thing. Before that, however, India startled the world by winning the World Cup, against odds of 500 to 1, under Kapil Dev’s captaincy in the summer of 1983. This gave an added piquancy to the 1983-84 Indo-Pak series in India, but on the whole the tour turned out to be a damp squib. The Pakistani team was crippled by the absence of Imran (injured), Sarfraz (suspended for six months for disciplinary reasons) and Abdul Qadir (dropped over a financial dispute). With Imran injured, Zaheer finally had the captaincy he had long coveted, and he was joined for the first time by yet another member of the illustrious Hanif Mohammad family – his son, Shoaib.

  That, alas, was not the only resemblance to the tours of the 1950s. All three Test matches were drawn, though in each case bad weather played a part. The elements were not the only factors conspiring against the cricket; in Bangalore, the state government decided to withdraw the traditional entertainment tax exemption for sporting fixtures, seriously depressing the sale of tickets. The cricket was unutterably tedious for the most part, with Gaekwad scoring an undistinguished double-century and Miandad averaging 75 without a single three-figure score. The third test, at Nagpur, might have proved decisive, had five hours not been lost to rain. But once again India and Pakistan had played out a test series in which neither side had shown a burning desire to win.

  The series was, however, noteworthy for a new development, unsurprising in the wake of India’s World Cup win but without precedent so far in the Indo-Pakistani rivalry. That was that, while the Test matches were largely greeted with general indifference, the three ODIs played between the two
sides attracted sell-out crowds. India won the two official ODIs comfortably, befitting the new world champions, but the truly spectacular success of the tour was a benefit match for the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund, played under floodlights at a stadium that had been built for the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi. India was new to floodlit cricket and the lights inevitably failed, but the delirious crowd of over 100,000 hung on and it was past midnight before India sealed its nocturnal triumph. It was clear that something crucial had changed, and that one-day cricket would now become the true crucible of the two countries’ cricketing rivalry.

  This was underscored by the inauguration of a new phenomenon in world cricket – the one-day tournament staged at a neutral venue. The first such event took place in 1984 in the Arab emirate of Sharjah, where a Pakistani-educated Arab businessman, Abdur Rahman Bukhatir, with the guidance of Asif Iqbal, staged the inaugural Sharjah Cup at a stadium he had constructed especially for the purpose. Bukhatir, who had acquired a taste for the game during his student days in Pakistan, realized that the large number of subcontinental workers in the Gulf constituted a captive and cricketstarved audience in this unlikely setting. It was equally clear that the rivalry that was likely to attract the throngs to his new stadium was that between India and Pakistan. Bukhatir therefore set about persuading the two countries to play in Sharjah, sweetening the pot with generous offers to make retired Indian and Pakistani cricketers the beneficiaries of the proceeds under an arrangement he called the Cricketers’ Benevolent Fund Series.

  After staging exhibition games from 1981, Bukhatir lobbied successfully for official recognition of Sharjah as an international cricket venue in 1984. The first official ODI tournament in Sharjah, recognized by the global sport’s governing body, the International Cricket Council, was an intriguing success. It featured, for the first time in international cricket, neutral umpires, not drawn from either of the participating countries on the field. In keeping with the subcontinental focus, Bukhatir invited the three South Asian teams, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, to play each other for what he called the Asia Cup. India won both its matches; Pakistan lost both of its. But the crowds turned up in large numbers, and India were happy to leave Sharjah as the new Asia Cup champions. They promised to come back the following year, for a tournament that would also involve England and Australia.

  But before that, there was a return engagement to be conducted, in pursuance of the plans of overzealous officialdom for an annual exchange of tours. India travelled to Pakistan for what was intended to be a three-test, three-ODI series in 1984-85. They won a oneday benefit match but lost the first official ODI by 46 runs. The first two test matches followed, both drawn in increasingly fractious circumstances. Indian frustration over the umpiring boiled over earlier than on previous tours. Sunil Gavaskar (newly restored to the captaincy after Kapil Dev had been rewarded for his World Cup success by being defenestrated from his skipper’s slot by the selectors) let fly after the first Test at Lahore, where umpire Shakoor Rana had been at his worst: ‘Despite the best efforts of the Pakistan umpires to favour the home team,’ he said, ‘we have managed to draw the Test and that is a miracle. Before embarking on the tour of Pakistan we expected close decisions, but what happened in the Lahore test was pre-planned and pre-determined.’ This time there was to be no insincere avowals of confidence in the Pakistani umpires. The ever-diplomatic General Zia, however, tried to soothe ruffled feathers by presenting Gavaskar with a gold shield to mark his 100th Test appearance.

  The second test at Faisalabad required no heroics from the visiting players: even Pakistani umpires could not affect the outcome of the match. The pitch was a featherbed – described by that city’s mayor as a ‘barren and wretched piece of earth’ and ‘a heartbreaking strip’ which he blamed for keeping fans away from the grounds – that produced 1174 runs for the loss of only 16 wickets. Patil and Shastri scored attractive centuries in India’s 500 all out, then watched in horror as Pakistan responded with 674 for 6, Qasim Umar scoring 210, the perennial Mudassar making 199, and the young Salim Malik weighing in with 102 not out. A grand total of 387.3 overs in five days was not enough to permit even the first innings of both sides to be concluded. Zaheer’s defensive captaincy, a stark contrast to the flamboyance of Imran, did not help matters either. The crowds stayed away in droves.

  India was doing well in the second ODI, on 210 for 3 with Vengsarkar on 94 not out, when word came in that Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated in New Delhi. The ODI was immediately abandoned and the rest of the tour called off. Few on either side of the border mourned the demise of what had been an uninspiring series. Later that winter, India beat Pakistan again in Sharjah, going on to win the Rothman’s Cup by thrashing Australia in the final. The World Championship of Cricket in Australia – a sort of mini-World Cup, with all the Test teams participating – followed, with India beating Pakistan comfortably in a one-sided final by 8 wickets. Gavaskar relinquished the captaincy on a note of triumph. It was India’s heyday as a one-day team.

  Though no tour was scheduled the following year, India and Pakistan met in two one-day tournaments in Sharjah. The first was in November 1985, with the West Indies also present, again for the Rothman’s Cup (this time India lost both its matches). The second Sharjah encounter, in March 1986 for the AustralAsia Cup, a tournament featuring the three South Asian Test sides as well as Australia and New Zealand, proved to be history-making. India’s three-wicket victories over New Zealand and Sri Lanka set up another final with Pakistan. This match produced what is arguably the single-most memorable last ball in the history of ODIs, when Pakistan, chasing an Indian total of 245 for 7, the highest score of the tournament so far, were poised at 242 for 9 with just one ball to go, centurion Javed Miandad at the crease. India needed just one wicket (or a ball that conceded no more than two runs) to win the match; Pakistan, who apart from Miandad had been outclassed throughout the game, needed a boundary to pull off an unlikely victory. The inexperienced Indian paceman entrusted with the last over, Chetan Sharma, delivered a full toss, which Javed pulled into the stands for a last-ball six. The stadium erupted, as did television audiences throughout the subcontinent; scenes of delirium shook the packed stands. Miandad finished on 116 not out; the next highest scorer on his side had made 36.

  It was an extraordinary moment. Pakistani commentators dubbed it ‘the shot of the century’. Thirty-six different songs were composed and released in Pakistan to celebrate Miandad’s six, and the batsman was awarded a million dollars for his genius. Pakistan had never before won a one-day tournament, whereas India were holders of the two most prestigious ODI trophies in the world. Miandad’s stroke transformed Pakistan’s self-belief as a one-day side, energized a nation and entered the folklore of the sport. Chetan Sharma, who with three wickets had been India’s most successful bowler in the Pakistani innings, later took a World Cup hat-trick, but he would never be able to live down the ignominy of his last-ball humiliation in Sharjah.

  The two sides met again in Sharjah in December that year. Chetan Sharma was not picked, and Miandad made 0, Pakistan winning an anti-climactically ow-scoring encounter (in a tournament, the Champions’ Trophy, that the West Indies won). Then, at the beginning of 1987, came one more return series, with Pakistan travelling to India.

  Both sides had done well in the interim; in addition to their ODI triumphs, India under Kapil had won a Test series in England 2-0, and Pakistan had shared an enthralling series at home 1-1 with the world champions, the West Indians. Most intriguingly, that series had been played under neutral umpires – as it happens, Indian umpires invited by the Pakistan Cricket Board. Nur Khan and skipper Imran had become understandably tired of their team’s successes being discredited by the performance of the Pakistani umpires. Their decision to remove allegations of umpiring bias from the equation not only made the cricket tension-free (except for the more enjoyable sporting tensions associated with the run of play), it started a trend that would eventually be a
dopted worldwide.

  When the Pakistanis arrived in India soon after New Year’s Day 1987, however, the political situation between the two countries made for a tenser atmosphere than on the previous two occasions. For all his professions of good neighbourliness (and a public request to be able to attend the Jaipur Test, which he did amidst much fanfare and talk of ‘cricket diplomacy’), General Zia was providing more than moral support to two groups of rebels active in India, the Khalistani terrorists and the Kashmiri mujahideen. Many on the right of the Indian political spectrum were beginning to question the wisdom of playing cricket as usual with a country that was systematically seeking to bleed India at the same time, but their voices were still relatively muted and the tour proceeded without significant incident. The goodwill with which Pakistani cricketers had traditionally been welcomed in India was, however, fraying, and on some occasions Pakistani fielders patrolling the boundary felt obliged to put helmets on to shield themselves from fruit being thrown at them by unruly Indian spectators. India’s cricketing establishment, however, more than made up for the bad manners of the fans, treating their guests with a warmth and hospitality that was favourably commented upon by the Pakistani players themselves.

  On the cricket field, few expected a reversal of the long-standing tradition whereby neither side had lost a Test series in its own homeland. Indeed, the Tests initially seemed to mark a reversion to type, since the flurry of excitement that had accompanied the exciting contests of 1978-79 and 1979-80 had already given way to the tedium of 1983-84 and 1984-85. The 1986-87 series seemed likely to prove no exception, with the first four Tests meandering to pointless draws on pitches which at no stage looked likely to provide a result. Slow over-rates, defensive (even negative) tactics by both sides, and unresponsive pitches stripped the matches of any meaning. Centuries were scored by Shoaib, Imran and Ijaz for Pakistan and Azharuddin (twice), Vengsarkar and Shastri for India (Azhar, a world-class batsman and a Muslim, had announced his arrival on the Test scene by scoring centuries in each of his first three test matches, against England in 1984-85.) The one curiosity in the Pakistani team selection was the recall of Younus Ahmed after seventeen years, a period he had spent playing for Surrey and qualifying, at least theoretically, for England. (Younus came second in the tour averages, but did not distinguish himself in the two Tests he played, one of which featured an acrimonious exchange with Gavaskar after an unsuccessful appeal against the Pakistani batsman). After the fourth test, India and Pakistan had again played out eleven successive draws.