U-Turns please, we’re Pakistani!

From lofty and very lonely heights, the foreign writer tries to decipher what went wrong with the game of cricket after the glorious days when the Imperial Sun used to shine all day from East to West. As the westerner purposefully sips on his mild cup of Twining’s Earl Gray tea with spice and cinnamon extract at a small cafe overlooking the grandiose Lord’s Cricket Ground, he racks his head as he struggles to understand the Pakistan Cricket board (PCB). How it is that the PCB could go ahead and ban all of their talented – albeit scoundrel – cricketers, then go ahead and completely reverse that decision, unbanning all previously banned cricketers along with their tainted reputations?

Of course, at some level he realises that the complexity of the issue is far beyond what his pasty-white civilised mind is capable of. And then all of a sudden – SNAP! He gets a great idea for a cricket satire piece (because everything we can’t understand we tend to satirise), and he diligently begins typing his piece for CricInfo. Originally titled ‘U-Turns Please, we’re Pakistani,’ the title was shortly thereafter changed to ‘U-Turns Please, we’re the PCB,’ after a couple of upset Pakistani commentators expressed how hurt they were at being stereotyped and how that might borderline at racism.

The article was a grand old laugh and Alan Tyers, that old boy, had written a fabulous piece but it was even more of a grand old laugh, because it displayed the utter lack of understanding of the inner workings of the Pakistani-mentality by the innocent Englishman. To his credit though, I thought the title ‘U-Turns Please, we’re Pakistani’ was completely apt, until CricInfo had to step in, much like the PCB, and reverse its original decision in favour of diluting the title in a disgusting cesspool of political correctness.

While he did get the inner complexity of the U-Turn phenomenon, what our British subject completely failed to grasp was that we’re Pakistani! Not only are we fond of spontaneous U-Turns, but we’re excessively drawn to double-U-Turns, W-Turns, viscous cuts, and killer swerves. We’re one dastardly nation, that finds it extremely inconvenient to play by the rules. We didn’t come up with traffic rules and certainly didn’t draw out the ‘Gentleman’s Guide to Cricketing Etiquette’ either. We conveniently inherited them from our gracious colonisers who came here all the way from the west, to try to teach us the fruits of civilisation.

However, if you just look at how we’ve adapted to the system of traffic as well as cricket, it is quite evident that we threw both the rule books in the bin and simply tried to figure things out as they made sense to us. So, just like ferocious overtaking from the left isn’t considered one of the deadly sins, rather an incredible talent on Pakistani asphalt, the ingenuity of cricketing innovations like reverse-swing and the deadly doosra (the one that spins the other way) only bare further witness to how the Pakistani way of thinking is simply ulta (the other way around).

Now I don’t blame Tyers, the poor chap, for he possesses what I would call a rather linear faculty of looking at things. Our non-linear, ulta way of thinking is something that’s simply, well, beyond him. Forgive me for using a cricketing analogy for explaining this rather non-communicable idea, but just how cricket itself had its not-so-modest beginnings as a ‘gentleman’s sport’ between the Lords and the commoners (whom do you think batted and who fielded?), cricket in the subcontinent had its beginnings in smelly narrow lanes and puddle-ridden inner-city gullies.

While in the gentleman’s variation of the sport, one had to use the powers of the intellect to out-wit the batsman into throwing away his wicket, the objective in street cricket is to hit the batsman as hard as you can in the ribs or the unmentionable parts, so that he doesn’t dare stand to face the next ripping delivery. Even in batting, where the gentleman would calmly wait and defend the ball with a straight bat, the unruly colonial subject would look to slog the well-flighted ball out of the ground with as cross a bat as possible.

This different approach to the sport is, no doubt, all due to our lateral-thinking abilities. And while test cricket may have been the original format of the game where a gentleman’s straight bat gets the reward of a well-played innings, the tide has since changed towards the likes of the T-20, where a ruthless cross-bat shot is the only thing that could help you win when six runs are needed from one ball. The high and lofty sport of cricket has no doubt suffered from the infamous phenomenon known as ‘reverse-colonisation,’ yet another reversal. Cricket is no longer about being gentlemanly or being honorable or a good sport. Cricket is now about being cut-throat to the bone, taunting and swearing at the batsman, distracting him with all sorts of cross-chatter in strange tongues which he fails to understand.