Sunday’s victory in the final of the second Twenty-20 World Cup cricket tournament at Lord’s has sent Pakistan reeling with incredulous joy. In the cities, youths were out parading the streets late at night with national flags fluttering in the wind. The traditional sweets were distributed amid a chant of “Pakistan Zindabad”. Not even the most restrained and understated personality was able to keep control of the emotion that welled up within. Something extraordinary has happened; some collective chord has been struck which defies interpretation.
The scene on TV was bristling with ironies. Expatriate Pakistanis at Lord’s in London were clearly feeling the thrust of these ironies. Judged by any yardstick, they were the most depressed segment of Pakistan in the world before the match. In March this year the Sri Lankan team was attacked in Lahore by the terrorists; some of its players were wounded; but the real casualty was Pakistan’s cricket. More than that, the incident had killed hope. The attack had come from a terrorist warlord ruling from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. The aim was the defeat of Pakistan as a state. And the impression the people of Pakistan got was that terror was winning against the state.
More or less the same team that was attacked in March had remained unbeaten in the Twenty-20 World Cup. Sri Lanka had sailed into the final of the tournament without much difficulty. As the two teams faced off on the field, one of three match umpires was the same who had narrowly escaped being killed at the hands of the terrorists in Lahore. It was recalled that after the incident, his statement was among the bitterest issued against the management of the series in Pakistan. But it is a tribute to the spirit of the game that he stood in judgement over the match on Sunday and decided each appeal fairly in favour of Pakistan.
The Pakistani team was symbolically led by a Pashtun, Younis Khan, one of the three in the team whose mother tongue is Pashto, the same spoken by warlord Baitullah Mehsud who has proved to be the scourge of the Pashtun people before threatening the very existence of the state of Pakistan. All-rounder Shahid Afridi, whose co-tribesmen are suffering under the savage rule of a local warlord in Khyber, lifted himself from a long trough of indifferent batting to shine with two consecutive fifties in the semi-final and the final against West Indies and Sri Lanka. His bowling was to be the mainstay of Pakistan’s overall performance in the tournament.
The second symbolic challenge to Baitullah Mehsud was the bowling of another Pashtun, Umar Gul, who ended up with the biggest haul of wickets in an international Twenty-20 match. The victories in the two matches in the run-up to the final could not have been possible without him. The man who was expected to do the job Gul did was Suhail Tanvir, the fast bowler from Punjab. He was the bowler the teams feared most, but miraculously he failed to fire throughout the championship, as if to make possible an appropriate symbolic display of Pakistan’s struggle against terrorism.
Captain Younis Khan was “realistic” to begin with. His predictions were balanced rather than optimistic. There was no boasting. When in the earlier matches Pakistan typically did badly some critics lost patience with him even though his personal performance with the bat was a rebuke to the other more flamboyant batsmen. In his case too, the stage was set as if by Providence to complete the message the national cricket team was to send in all directions: to the world that is sceptical of Pakistan’s ability to fight the warlords; to the cricketers who were refusing to play in Pakistan; and to the ICC who could decide the fortunes of cricket in Pakistan by tightening the purse-strings on Pakistan Cricket Board.
It is inappropriate to call it just a “feel-good gift”. In fact it is more significant than the victory gained in the One-Day World Cup in 1992. Today, the nation is united against a challenge to its very survival. The army is fighting the terrorists successfully, defying analyses that guerrilla wars go on forever. The terrorists were symbolically killing Pakistani culture. The match at Lord’s has symbolically pushed the enemies of civilisation back and regained for us the ground we had lost at home.
