Evolution of Pakistan Cricket: The Champions Trophy Timestamp

Construction and protocol meetings are scheduled for 11am, while surprise inspections will take place at 5am. On Wednesday night, the team achieved their highest-ever ODIs chase. If you ask a country about hosting its first mega cricket event in 29 years with the question "How's the josh?", be prepared for your eardrums to be shattered.

The ICC Champions Trophy is the first time Pakistan will play independent host of a multilateral world event – featuring more than four teams. (Its previous two World Cups were shared with India (1987), Sri Lanka was added in 1996.) In June 2008, Pakistan hosted an Asia Cup featuring six teams, including Hong Kong and UAE, but the ICC Champions Trophy is the real biggie. Teams from all corners at one event and naturally an official song is already out. It’s called Jeeto Baazi Khel Ke but when Atif Aslam belts the chorus, what’s audible is Dharti dekho dhadke, jeeto baazi ladd ke (the ground is shaking/go fight and win).

Pakistan’s famous old grounds have been renovated, the iconic Gaddafi has risen anew. Its old pavilion/club house were demolished, roof removed and its capacity increased between 8,000-10,000 to 34,000. (Good news the gorgeous brickwork still survives around the flanks). Gaddafi’s new LED lights were given a bit of a working over after New Zealand’s Rachin Ravindra was struck on the head by the ball while fielding – losing sight of the ball as it came flat off a Khushdil Shah slog sweep. The steel fences that blocked ground-level views are gone, replaced by a Mohali-like moat. Karachi and Rawalpindi still have their fences but there’s been the usual ICC smartening up: fixed seating, new replay screens and the National Stadium’s previously foreboding main building painted in seaside white and blue.

Yet, even as the welding, hammering and installation was on, news regularly piped through the X-verse that the work would not be completed in time and the event would have to be moved to the ever-helpful UAE. Till as late as the second week of January. Plus YouTubers and social media influencers wandered over the grounds with independent assessments and/or doomsday pronouncements. A former ICC official familiar with its events organisation says, “I don’t think I have ever seen so much pressure on a host country.”

Well, the ICC folk have reached, New Zealand have already won the recent tri-series against the hosts and Afghanistan were on view in their first practice match in Karachi on Sunday. Security? It is being pointed out that England, who had not toured Pakistan since 2005, have visited three times in the last three years. And that New Zealand, who in September 2021 pulled out citing security concerns minutes before the start of their first ODI in Pakistan in 18 years, are today on their fourth tour inside four years.

Umair Javed, associate professor of sociology and politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and ‘cricket sufferer’ on his X handle, has fond memories of watching live matches during the 1996 World Cup as a nine-year-old, including the festive occasion of the final. He will go to some Champions Trophy matches too and says, “There’s an element of excitement with international cricket, especially with tournament cricket coming back. We’ve had bilaterals for some years which are good to watch… but this time we’ll get to watch a wider array of cricketers through a tournament like the Champions Trophy.”

When bilateral cricket resumed in Pakistan after the 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan team bus, fans braced themselves for long lines and wait times and some non-pleasant match experiences. “But as cricket fans everyone felt,” he says, “that this needed to be done… we had to put up with all of it. Since then, things have got better in terms of the match-day experience.”

Pakistani fans are now used to the challenges that the Champions Trophy will throw at them. “There’s still obviously a lot of security-related disruptions that happen on match days, traffic flows are disrupted and you have to walk longer distances to get to the grounds. But from the perspective of entertainment, for people who are interested in cricket, live cricket is its own product. And live cricket can’t be replaced by anything else, so having that option is always great.”

He then points out that this was his “instinctive response” to conversation around the Champions Trophy as that ‘cricket sufferer’. As academic and scholar however, “one has to temper the enthusiasm - and I’m not saying this is mass opinion - but every sporting spectacle needs scrutiny.” There is, he says, an under-current of looking at the event as a “regime-legitimising exercise”. (Pakistan’s interior minister Mohsin Naqvi is PCB chairman.) But Umair says, “the general sentiment is that people are excited - it’s a form of entertainment that people have not necessarily had good access to for the last many years and they’re getting access back to it.”

He also points out that regardless of the team’s success, if the Champions Trophy “is executed without any major problems, it will be seen as a win for Pakistani cricket generally” and adds “and paper over Pakistan cricket’s dysfunctions.” Which is what sporting spectacles do.

Except over the last 15-odd years, Pakistan cricket has been through events and experiences like no other frontline cricketing nation. It is why Ahmer Naqvi, Pakistani writer on cricket and pop culture who has just updated his 2016 chapter in Routledge’s Handbook of Contemporary Pakistan says, “Without being hyperbolic about it… given the politics of international cricket and how bleak the situation looked for Pakistan (in 2016), I think the Champions Trophy is huge. We’ve revamped the stadiums and will host a big tournament with these major teams.”

Reworking his 2016 chapter in the now gave him a renewed ‘long sweep’ view of Pakistan cricket’s jagged arc. “It’s made me realise how almost inevitable cricket is as a cultural force in Pakistan. It is the only cultural currency that has survived all kinds of regimes, all kind of crises.” Unlike, he points out, Pakistani cinema or even pop music.

In the decade between Ahmer’s two Routledge articles, he says, “despite all the crazy scandals,” Pakistan cricket kept growing. “It’s not ossified or stayed still.” Even without state support or intervention it is a life force he is now certain would continue to breathe, live, move. Cricket in Pakistan he says, “is very, very persistent”.

The Champions Trophy it seems is but a timestamp in Pakistan cricket’s incessant shape-shifting evolutions.

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