Don’t wanna to join the Cricket FUN?????

Don Bradman, they say, was a once-in-a-generation batsman. There may be a rather close tie for the same appellation amongst the bowlers, with Shane Warne and Muthaiah Muralitharan sharing the same; depending on what nationality the voters’ list comprises of. But talking of captaincy in cricket in general, it will be an exercise in futility to ever get down to the business of hunting down that one skipper, who could be termed as the best in the world by a reasonable enough distance. Why talk a generation, even when looks at comparing the leaders within contemporary cricket, the debate on who the best man is, usually has its share of contenders.
And talking of captaincy and its purported effect on the results of games, it has also been the one bane that the Pakistani cricket from the decade of the 1990s has been so shorn of. Ever since the retirement of the leader-of-the-men, Imran Khan, Pakistan has been infested with in-fighting enough to a level where many thought whether they win anything in cricket at all. Some put it down to crab-mentality – on part of the others – of pulling a successful man down, others called it the gross incompetence of the skipper to pull the differences aside and play and win as a team, while fingers have been pointed at the lack of communication skills, both within and out of the team.
It has been 17 years since the cricketing world bade Imran Khan a good-bye, and the list of Pakistanis who have ascended the ultimate cricketing throne is rather long. 11 captains in a span of 17 years can quite easily be described as the most in that period – India has had six in the same time – but what has brought the results to their knees is the fact that there have been occasions when the side is half-full of former and aspiring skippers, making the task of the real man with the job, difficult.
The one other conclusion that can be drawn from having so many ex-captains in a playing eleven is the fact that too much chopping and changing of this role has happened, which makes for grudges and suspicious nature only natural. As does it affect the consistency within the ranks, thus, making it almost impossible for the players to look up to a man in charge and only confusing them further.
And to drill home that point, the performances of the Pakistani team over time have been erratic at best, with a tendency to go down in matches from a point of considerable strength. During Imran Khan regime, and even before that, the Pakistan team was deemed to be enigmatic, and unpredictable, but there had been many instances also where they came from the dead to win games as well. Post Imran Khan’s retirement, these examples begun to dwindle away at a rate quicker than the pre-election promises made by the politicians do, after getting elected.
And to top it all, the security situation in the country was the most unfortunate thing that could happen to Pakistan cricket as a whole. Without any home games, logic says that their international cricketing fixtures would have been halved by now, thus ensuring that the exposure to play on tracks which behave distinctly different would have been reduced to those who are lucky enough to feature in the county cricket.
To cut a long story short, if captaining the Indian team was difficult, then the same role within the Pakistani environ has been anything but a walk in the park or a slumber on a bed of roses.  This is why, Younus Khan’s ability to be able to flash that toothy grin through most times of adversity and in turn, inspire his team to an ICC World T20 win should rank at par with the 1992 triumph. In fact, comparing the two teams and the situations, there isn’t much to choose from between the two, but what was certainly different this time around was the format of the game.
The T20, as one would have experienced by now, is an almost logic-defying version of cricket, and a team needs a fair sprinkling of persistent form coupled with good fortune to be able to win a tournament like the World T20. Coming on the back of a 2007 World Cup which had seen a tearful farewell to the Pakistani team, and that, as early as in the first round of the tournament, combined with the absolute lack of cricket since then, credit must be afforded to the captain for the way he has handled the team ever since he took over as the skipper.
Continuing with the ICC World T20 itself, it must also be said that despite having taken up the job only recently, the team – and more so the captain – had its own share of critics, none more than the chief of selectors, Abdul Qadir, who handed over his resignation from his post. This, apparently, was due to the purported differences that he had with the captain, and occurred in the middle of the tournament! Any other mortal could have been influenced by this, and the first game defeat at the hands of the English team in the World T20. Yet, despite what the scores of former cricketers and experts – usually Pakistanis – had to say about the formation of cliques within the team, Younus Khan led the factious side to a stunning tournament win, that also included the ousters of two sides which hadn’t lost a single game up to that point of playing the them.
This is not to say that Khan has been perfect. One has seen enough dilly-dallying from him to be able to entrust full faith in the man. Already he has had refused captaincy when Inzamam-ul-Haq had been out of a series or two, because he did not want to be, in his own words, a ‘dummy captain’. There was a series of flip-flops that followed, before he rejected – or probably the higher echelons of the PCB on that occasion shunned him out of the captaincy race. Then came the 2007 World Cup disaster, and despite being offered a more permanent role – as later got offered to Shoaib Malik too – Khan surprisingly refused again, citing a rather ambivalent reason of not having enough crowd support or something to that regard.
Yet, the appointment, and more importantly the continuation of Shoaib Malik as the captain of the Pakistani for a sustained period of time – around two years – despite the results could very easily be termed as a step in the right direction. The jury might be out there to decide whether or not he was a good enough captain – and am surely not too many would think he was – but the fact that the Pakistani board was willing to give him a long rope does augur well. And that is exactly what someone like Younus Khan needs; to be able to lead without that lurking fear of being chucked or vilified by the president of the board or anything to disintegrate the integrity of the man.
A world cup winning captain deserves at least this much respect from the board, if not from the former players.

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