When Shoaib Akhtar aka the Rawalpindi Express burst onto the scene, his need for speed was only matched and rivaled by that of Australia’s Brett Lee. But where Lee soared in the eyes of many, Akhtar’s career appeared chequered from the start beginning with rumours of chucking to later substance abuse of banned drug, nandrolone, for which the Pakistan Cricket Board pulled him out of the Champions Trophy. Akhtar’s run ins over indiscipline, breaking curfew hours began to overshadow headlines of Akhtar sending shivers down the batsmen’s spines, culminating in scuffles with team mates – the most famous of which being hitting his team mate Mohammad Asif on the shin.

His fitness plummeted, injuries took hold and controversies occupied centre stage to the point where many now attributed Akhtar to be a bad influence on fellow fast bowler and the wrong role model to send across to future Pakistan cricketers. It was believed that Shoaib Akhtar been unceremonially dumped from Pakistan cricket’s plans when he received a surprise call up to the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011, one that only he seemed not surprised about.

As if in vindication of that faith, Akhtar showed glimpses of his heady days, particularly against Sri Lanka and at the start of New Zealand’s innings. But apparently while Shahid Afridi remained optimistic of Akhtar’s talent, the Pakistan coach, Waqar Younis, had doubts about Akhtar’s fitness and in the end, won Afridi over. If that is indeed the case, it would not be the first time that Akhtar was sidelined on reasons of fitness.

But what has generated this wave of empathy, if not understanding, of the once highly feared fast bowler, is because perhaps his end has been hastened not entirely through a fault of his own. Instead had Pakistan been more proactive about tackling the inefficiency in the wicket keeping department, Kamran Akmal would not only be a better wicket keeper at the World Cup but could have also saved the blushes so early for Akhtar, with the tournament really only half way as far as the real contest is concerned. Akhtar looked keen to put himself out there, irrespective of whether his body held the capability to hold up. He teased and tormented Ross Taylor. But that only a few will remember as after a double benevolence of catches from Kamran, Taylor ripped through the Pakistan efforts to post a thundering stamp of authority on the game, virtually annihilating the presence of the Rawalpindi Express thereafter. How different could the story have ended had Pakistan lifted their game as far as wicket keeping is concerned! Shoaib Akhtar and the rest of the cricket world can only imagine.

The brash arrogance of the Indian cricketers to even pompously state that the World Cup would be won for Sachin Tendulkar has now received a painful thud to the ground. Instead the Indian cricket team will now have to pull out all stops, perform beyond what they have shown thus far in the tournament and earn back the respect and the favourites tag they had firmly cornered at the start of the tournament.

Once again it can be said that Bangladesh has proved to be India’s nemesis at the World Cup. In the 2007 edition in the Caribbean, losing to Bangladesh was the final undoing of India’s ill timed efforts. On that occasion, several factors went into India’s ill preparedness for the World Cup with misleading ideas and a disharmonious relationship between the coach and team. In the 2011 edition, India’s beginning with a match against Bangladesh was billed as a revenge match. While India won the encounter, Bangladesh won the hearts with their consistent chase, making India’s huge total look not as threatening as it would to a team ranked much lower.

Thereafter India have pushed themselves but not managed to overcome the defiance of their opponents. Like Bangladesh, England set themselves up for victory. But for Zaheer Khan’s bowling, the tie was not even on the cards in the manner in which England were moving forward under Andrew Strauss and his batting. India’s defeat to South Africa completely exposed not only India’s chinks in the armour but also, the smug manner in which the Indian batsmen frittered away the advantage of the assault laid by Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag.

The disciplined manner in which some teams are quietly going about their business has exposed even more the disdain with which the Indian team have taken towards certain issues which are now being necessarily being unearthed but certainly given spotlight to by the captain himself. If he really did not think India were improving in the fielding standards, it begs the question why Robin Singh was fired during Gary Kirsten’s tenure as the Indian coach and why Mahendra Singh Dhoni did not feel the need to talk about it in public until this time when the spotlight is so glaring.

The Indian cricket team that spoke about being spoilt for options in the bowling department is now struggling with an inflexibility that shows little confidence in the reserves, to the extent that they are now persisting with players who have thus far failed to show an indication of improvement and instead is draining the efforts of their team mates through their personal setbacks. With a team with such rigid notions and a frozen campaign set in concrete, uncharacteristic of the way this present Indian team has risen to the top, the team plans will need a drastic make in the forthcoming days if the idea of India being hot favourites for the title needs to be resuscitated.

Pakistan’s fragile cricket fortunes were once again brought to the surface as Pakistan lost the New Zealand in not only shocking fashion but also, under drastically dramatic circumstances. Prior to the New Zealand encounter, Pakistan appeared unexpectedly motivated, determined in their efforts to compensate for any weakness with overpowering talent. That would explain the rather surprisingly smooth partnerships between Younis Khan and Misbah ul Haq as well as Shahid Afridi turning it on with the ball in the tournament thus far.

Shenanigans about the fragile opening partnerships, dips in bowling fortunes in the absence of two of the fast bowlers banned for malpractice, and a dressing room environment filled with stories of sabotage and backstabbing, all appeared to be a thing of the past as Pakistan went quickly from being distant prospects to dark horses, all in the span of three overs. Given Pakistan’s bleak cricket fortunes with no immediate prospect of a home series, Pakistan were en route to eliminating from the mind that they had indeed lost the opportunity to be a part of the carnival by hosting alongside the sub continent cricket playing nations.

But then the glass shattered and splintered, exposing all of Pakistan’s painful wounds and sending a great part of the cricket world back into doleful recollections of Pakistan’s past indiscretions, overshadowing the fact that the defeat did nothing more than to affect Pakistan’s standing in the table but in no way, jeopardizing their progress to the quarterfinal stage.

Unfortunately it was Kamran Akmal who took the decisive spot under the harsh glare of the fans and the media. It did not take two and two to connect the dots. Kamran was reportedly on the ICC’s radar in the light of the spot fixing scandal that turned the cricket world upside down. Clear for want of evidence, Kamran only recently spoke out about how the allegations came at the cost of personal hurt and that the game was not something he held lightly.

However, there was little indication, particularly more so in the game against New Zealand, to suggest that Kamran Akmal was taking any serious strides either to improve in the glove department. While his batting holds the possibility of being that of a street fighter like South Africa’s Mark Boucher, Kamran’s wicket keeping raised eyebrows in Australia last year and it would be an understatement to say, that those suspicions were fortified by his dismal keeping against New Zealand, sadly putting Pakistan cricket back on trial.

Ross Taylor could not have had a better birthday gift, if he wished for one. Kamran Akmal, on the other hand, could have had a more disastrous follow up to those swirling rumours about his character and integrity. Two dropped catches was bad. But the manner in which they came was worse. On one occasion, where the wicket keeper should be lunging for everything within his reach, he merely looked on at the slip fielder, Younis Khan, in bemusement. If that did not infuriate cricket aficionados, Kamran dropped a regulation catch that would have embarrassed a school boy.

That double reprieve for Taylor shattered Pakistan beyond imagination. As Taylor thundered away, and more a hundred runs broke the sound barrier in the final five overs, all that Pakistan looked to leave behind in the past has came back with haunt them and halt them in their tracks once more. Pakistan lay decimated once more, in match and in spirit. It is the latter that Pakistan cricket can ill afford.

The head football coach at Fordson High is Fouad Zaban, a Muslim and a former Fordson player. He proposed this simple rescheduling of one week of August two-a-day practices to accommodate the fast and to beat the heat. But making such an atypical switch was not a simple process. It involved getting the approval of school and district officials and local police. It meant winning the acceptance of players and parents. And it required easing the surrounding neighbors’ concerns about added noise and light at night. So Zaban went on a letter-writing campaign explaining his rationale, eventually winning the hearts and minds of the community. Zaban’s sales pitch included promoting the players’ freedom to break their fast at Maghrib prior to attending the masjid, and then still being able to grab a light meal after practice and attending Fajr salat at the masjid. It was ultimately hard for the school not to appreciate a plan so sound.

Such logistical issues have surfaced anew because Ramadan had not previously touched the late summer since the early 1980’s. But back then there was not nearly the number of Muslims in Dearborn as there is now, with an estimated 95% of Fordson High’s current student population being Muslim.

The assimilation of Muslims in sports has become an even bigger issue in professional sports, with professional soccer being a hotbed for Ramadan-related stories. The professional soccer league in the United Arab Emirates will also be shifting the start times of its matches to well after 10 PM as it kicks off its season during Ramadan. Ironically, in Iran, one of their most prominent soccer players, Ali Karimi was kicked off of his professional team for not fasting. The football club Steel Azin issued a statement saying, “…respecting God’s laws and honoring the sacred laws of Islam are of the utmost importance to Steel Azin.”

Real Madrid midfielder Mesut Ozil is another prominent Muslim footballer who has made the personal choice not to fast during the season. While several other prominent soccer players, including Inter Milan’s Sulley Ali Muntari, and Sevilla’s Frederic Kanoute, make the choice to fast during play.

European coaches have dealt with this problem in differing ways. The manager of English soccer team Arsenal, Arsene Wenger, has allowed his players to fast. Arsenal happens to employ a large number of North African Muslim players. However, some European club managers have not been so accommodating. Current Real Madrid manager, and former Inter Milan manager, José Mourinho declared that Muslim players should not fast, thereby eliciting criticism from local Muslim leaders.

There are is actually some divergence of opinion as to whether one is allowed to forego fasting in order to participate in professional sports. Some Muslim leaders have allowed athletes to play as normal and make up their fast at a later stage in the year. ZMD, the Muslim Central Council in Germany, has stated, in collaboration with Egyptian mosques, that it has been authorized to allow professional Muslim soccer players to eat normally during Ramadan. Al Azhar University in Cairo, one of Islam’s leading authorities, has also declared that professional athletes can be excused from fasting if it impacts their livelihood.

And the issue of fasting just may reach an even bigger world stage.  The 2012 Olympic Games will take place in London during Ramadan, leaving thousands of Olympic athletes to wrestle with a difficult decision. But in a world where non-Muslims seem to understand next to nothing about the lives and philosophies of Muslims, perhaps witnessing this dilemma faced by Muslim athletes will be an education in and of itself.

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.

As one self-proclaimed die-hard Pakistani cricket fan observed in a highly offended comment to Tyers’ quippy article:

Posted by Mahdi_E_Dra (June 07 2010, 22:09 PM GMT)

As a die hard fan of Pakistani cricket I don’t find this article hilarious. Yes our great cricketing nation does have lows, yes the team is full of shady characters and yes the team as a whole lacks culture and yes the team also has people who haven’t been potty trained properly [sic]. Having said all that, the Pakistani team always performs, remember we are the 20-20 champions if you discount one fluke innings by Michael Hussey. I challenge the readers and the writer of this article to name one cricketing side that has so many fixers, ball biters, charlatans and petty criminals and still manages to win international tournaments!

For one, the enthused fan who still happens to be in shock/denial over the thrashing we got from the Aussies in the T-20, is probably right (because we think laterally, Hussey does not exist, and he never hit that last boundary, which makes Pakistan the T-20 champions). There is no other cricketing side that still manages to win despite having so many match-fixers, ball-biters, charlatans, and petty-crooks, because probably, no other side has that wide a variety of deviant and delinquent characters in the first place. But just for the record, Shahid Afridi wasn’t biting the ball as a means of tampering, he was simply trying to impress the Close-Up toothpaste marketing team to get another sponsorship.

The attitude of the passionate fan above, however, quite characteristically displays the Pakistani stereotype as much as the pasty-white foreigners may have failed to capture it. The attitude is: ‘look we’re so messed up, and we’re so bad-ass, some of us are even hooked on opium, yet we’re still the best (well, almost).’ And the consolation prize to that kind of thinking is, ‘well maybe we suck, but at least we’re better than India.’ We’re excellent at pretending to be on terms with our skewed morality and even better at pretending we’re God’s gift to humanity as well as cricket despite all our ills.

But what someone like Tyers would simply be unable to realise is that, our ulta thinking goes far and wide beyond the realms of cricket and traffic. And most certainly, our history of banning, and unbanning, reversing decisions, overturning orders, etc. goes way, way beyond the PCB, and its all because we’re Pakistani.

Let’s start from the champion of banning, unbanning, and ultra-sharp U, almost V-Turns – none other than former President Pervez Musharraf. I mean, the guy’s innings was a miraculous nine-year cameo. He came on with the premise of cleaning up Pakistani politics once and for all, took the crease, banned all political parties, beat up old politicians only to turn around full circle, systematically unbanning all previously banned politicians, bringing back cricketing all-stars like Nawaz Sharif back into the foray of politics after a couple of reversed airplanes which were sent back from the airport. He passed the ultimate reversal decision, none other than the NRO, which overturned all the corruption cases in recent judicial history and even paved the way for one of the most ulta of people to come to the helm of the country to lead it for the next decade before we reverse that decision as well.

That’s not all. Like cricket and traffic, the rules of democracy and liberalism were also inherited from our white, colonial fathers. But look at our wavering record! We’ve gone through three dictatorships, followed by democratic regimes and each time the masses have reversed their decision on democracy, following a complete U-Turn into military rule. Forget the likes of Shoaib Akthar chucking his way back into international cricket after being banned, after 9/11 we ‘banned’ all terrorist outfits operating out of the country, and since that ban, terror outfits have only grown prodigiously in these fair lands.

The list goes on – the Punjab government banned late night cellphone packages so that the youth doesn’t get too corrupted talking to their boy/girlfriends all night, only to make the whole enterprise even more thrilling. We banned Facebook due to its blaspheming activities, but only for two weeks, after which the Lahore High Court reversed its decision and now Facebook is back with an even bigger bang. If we analyse these patterns closely, anything that’s gotten banned has come back stronger and more powerful than ever.

I think our ulta mentalities and terra ways of thinking have it so, that forbidden pleasures are the ones we enjoy the most, like running a red light or playing a reverse sweep. We love breaking the rules, banning the rules, ignoring the bana and subsequently, reversing our original ban. This kind of behaviour pattern goes far beyond the realm of understanding of our simple-minded colonising friends, who were sadly unable to understand it during periods of colonisaion, de-colonisation and now reverse-colonisation. Talk about U-Turns.

Reprinted from a post by Asif Akhtar on Dawn.