THE UNQUIET ONES: A HISTORY OF PAKISTAN CRICKET by Samiuddin Osman

Author:Samiuddin, Osman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

SECTION FOUR

THE HIGH

1982–1992

TWENTY-ONE

The 1992 World Cup

BY MOST STANDARDS he probably left it too late, but by Pakistan’s, Imran Khan managed to time it just right.

By the time his side arrived in Perth to take on Australia at the 1992 World Cup, they had won just one of their first five matches and were, in the words of one player, walking dead. Never one of life’s great communicators, Imran had become ever more distant during the tournament; a chronic shoulder injury kept his physical involvement intermittent and his cancer hospital project was the primary motivation of his off-field life.

He was leading in battered body—as fierce in some training sessions as he always was—but in spirit and soul, he was absent. ‘I think there’s a big communication problem in the team at the moment,’ Wasim Akram revealed at the time (as captured in Wasim and Waqar: Imran’s Inheritors, authored by John Crace). ‘For instance, Imran was talking to me about how we still had a chance, and all the youngsters hung back, but after we had left, they were asking me what he had said … it’s as if the team is scared of Imran.’

Nor was he a great orator, though he at least possessed the baritone for it. But now, in Perth, he gathered his men in the dressing room before the game, wearing a white T-shirt with a tiger—ready to pounce—imprinted on it. Something about the direness of the situation stirred him. ‘Maybe he thought that he could not be humiliated this badly, that he could not get this low in life, that God will not drop him so low,’ remembers Aaqib Javed, who, in a tournament where Pakistan veered so wildly, was a stabilizing centre of gravity in their bowling attack. ‘So after this, with so much crap around us, we can only win. There is nothing else left. I don’t know where he got this feeling from, I really don’t know, but he came into the dressing room. He came in wearing the T-shirt. Maybe, he just thought, let’s try one final time.’

Likely he could not have summoned it at any other time, or as if on demand. This was a moment, a feeling that welled up inside him; it was not a talk that could be replicated, or repeated over and over, thus risking dilution. It had to come then, both when it seemed too late and also just right.

Imran spoke to each player and told them to look inside themselves, to understand that they were the best players in the world. ‘You,’ he asked one, ‘is there a more talented player in the world than you?’ Is there a better fielder than you, he asked another, a better batsman than you? Having roused each player, he ended twenty minutes later with the image on his T-shirt, one that resonated most to him and how he saw himself; a tiger, a Pathan tiger, hunting, warring, surviving.

Now he invoked an ethic, one that had seen him through his toughest professional years when a shin injury threatened to finish his career.

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