I wish I was in Pakistan right now, watching the World Cup among my fellow 200 million 'cricket fever stricken' brothers and sisters. Actually, I'd rather be in Australia watching it live. The craze is not the same anymore though. Definitely not the same as it was in 2003 and all the world cups before that.
It is partly because our youth discovered football about 10 years ago when the English Premier League started airing on Pakistani television. When I was growing up you would see posters of and idolize the likes of Jonty Rhodes, Brian Lara, Wasim Akram and Shane Warne. These days kids want to dribble like Messi, bend it like Beckham, sprint like Bale and look like Ronaldo – Cristiano Ronaldo, not the real Ronaldo, as my Brazilian friends like to say.
It's hard to believe but now a days you will actually come across kids that don't know how to bowl an off spin or leg spin delivery, don't know what a googly is, let alone know how to bowl one, and can't hit a cover drive, and look good while doing so.
If you're walking by a cricket ground where there's a match going on and a player gets hurt and they ask you to play because you're the only extra around and they are in desperate need of a player, even though you're going to the tandoor to get naan for dinner and the family is waiting for you. If you are a Pakistani, you jump in like a champion and dominate that match. And when you eventually get home to your starving family three hours later and tell them what took you so long, they ask you, "How many did you make?"
Another reason why our present generation isn't, and the coming ones won't be, so passionate about cricket is that we haven't really had any super stars on our team in the last many years. The only one is Shahid Afridi, who is famous for his destructive batting which he uses to score 23 runs a game. The kids never really had anyone to look up to, whereas we grew up watching the best bowling attack in the world. Arguably the best fast bowler of all time, Wasim Akram – easily the best left handed bowler. He could swing the ball either way at a pace that most bowlers in the world couldn't even bowl straight at. Then we had Waqar Younis who could break toes at will with his banana swings at over 90 MPH. Shoaib Akhtar, fastest bowler in the world, enough said.
We had the pleasure of watching Yousaf Youhanna, later Mohammad Yousaf – one of the classiest batsmen in the world at his time. The legend Inzi, who never seemed to fail, except in his last innings where he came up two runs short of becoming the top run scorer for Pakistan in Tests. Both proved to be the backbone of Pakistan's batting line up in both forms of the game for almost a decade.
I originally wanted to write about how bad Pakistan played against India and how disappointing it was, but I got over the loss in the last couple of days. We fell victim to the trend that has been going on: when a team with a decent bowling line-up has put up a good total batting first, chases have been unsuccessful. Happened in each of the first four matches.
That's because the Australian and New Zealand pitches are very good to bat on in the sun. They're dry, have very true bounce, the ball doesn't deviate much, and spinners can't turn. But under lights, things change, the track is not as comfortable to bat on. Chasing 300 is never an easy task; add the pressure of the world cup to it, it becomes even tougher.
India came out much more confident than us. They had unbelievable crowd support. Their ones and twos were cheered on by the crowd like they were fours and sixes. Their body language was positive. They were never on the defense. We were never on top in the game. They took it away from us in the start and never gave it back. The toss played a huge part. If we had won the toss and batted first, things could have been very different.
We contained them well in the start; their run rate wasn't great. It was the middle overs where they took the game away from us. Our spinners and part timers let them relax and runs came freely. Once they were 200 for 2, the game was out of our hands. If our savior, Misbah, hadn't taken that half chance Dhawan gave us, they probably would have made 350 plus.
We did very well to restrict them to 300 but to be realistic, that was already too much for our fragile batting. Against India in a world cup with 80 percent of the crowd blue and orange, it probably appeared to be 400.
Except Misbah, no other batsman of ours would make any other top six team's batting line up. All our other batsmen look timid. There is no footwork whatsoever which shows that there is no confidence. Remember how Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist walked down the pitch against the new ball? And how Ricky Ponting pulled pacers for sixes on the front foot? Our guys can only score on bad balls and at the international level, you don't get many of those; you have to create opportunities to score. You need to take it to the bowlers, give them different looks, force them to change their field setup, play early, play late. You cannot sit in the crease, not move your feet and become a bulls eye for the bowlers.
We made Indian bowling look extraordinary when it's not. We couldn't rotate strike. They were bowling maidens in the middle of the innings. That showed how defensive and scared we were. Just the body language said everything. We just weren't willing to attack and be brave.
In an interview on '92 news' before the India Pak match, Imran Khan was asked about Pakistan's selection of Umar Akmal, a batsman who can keep wickets, over Sarfraz Ahmed, a specialist wicket keeper who can bat. He said something along the lines of, 'It's understandable to take a better batsman but the fear is that the nonspecialist keeper will drop a player like Kohli and it will cost us the game.'
That happened. Can't say if we lost because we dropped Kohli, but we lost, and we did drop Kohli.
Khan Saab! We need you to fly over to Australia and just give our team a talk. They need inspiration and confidence, they need to fight, play to win and not be afraid to lose. Not even think about anything other than winning.
As you famously say, "Once the fear of losing creeps into your head, you can no longer win."