How Cricket Explains Pakistan

Reprinted from Foreign Policy: In some countries, like England and Australia, cricket is played as recreation; in others, like India, as meditation. Watching Pakistani cricketers, however, one senses the sport is their purest physical expression. They are like Argentine footballers: unpredictable, a little shady, a bit dangerous, full of eccentrics and cranks, often inefficient and blundering, but possessed of a mercurial passion and an utter magic. When the legendary cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan led Pakistan to an improbable World Cup win in 1992, it wasn't just a triumph of skill, it was a celebration of cricket itself -- a game, its followers like to say, of "glorious uncertainties." Then, as now, in the lanes of Karachi and Lahore, in track pants and tees with duct tape wrapped around a tennis ball, or on parched Punjab dustlands, barefoot in salwar kameezes with homemade bats and bricks for stumps, youngsters are to be found tearing in to bowl, in a performance always. So when the brilliant light of Pakistan cricket dims, the rest of the cricket world takes notice. And these days, Pakistan is confronting some of its dimmest times, in cricket as in everything else.

In November 2008, following the Mumbai attack launched by Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, India broke cricket ties with Pakistan, causing the game there a significant financial blow. A few months later, in March 2009, a terrorist group attacked a visiting Sri Lankan team. This attack, undertaken in clear morning light, as the team bus drove to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, injured several of the players and killed six security men and the bus driver. Pakistan has not been able to host international cricket on home soil ever since. Then, in 2010, the national team was rocked by a match-fixing scandal: Three leading players, including the captain, were suspended as a result of a sting operation conducted by the British tabloid News of the World (the players are currently in Doha at a special cricket corruption court for hearings that are expected to conclude on Jan. 11), and a widening investigation has placed several other players under suspicion. Three years, three body blows to Pakistani cricket. It now stands on the brink of collapse.

Each of these events has deep roots. The modern concept of sport as big business came late to cricket. Not until India's economy was opened up in the mid-1990s, attracting multinational companies trying to reach a mammoth audience through advertising spots, could international cricket dream of signing television or player contracts worth even a fraction of those in, say, soccer or baseball. The coming of big money led to the thoughtless overscheduling of tournaments and, in an underregulated atmosphere, an explosion of interest from underworld betting cartels. These factors combusted into cricket's first match-fixing crisis in 2000, tarring big names across the world but especially in India, Pakistan, and South Africa. One may argue that India is scarcely a less corrupt nation than its neighbor -- the founder-commissioner of the big-bucks Indian Premier League, in fact, is under investigation on a wide range of corruption charges -- but at least it has been able to reward its elite cricketers spectacularly.

To read the complete article by Rahul Bhattacharya in Foreign Policy magazine, click on the title link, "How Cricket Explains Pakistan".