Why Cricket Doesn't Matter

Umar Gul and Yasir Hameed are two players who have not been at the centre of the Pakistani cricket uproar in recent weeks, but they are significant for two reasons. Firstly, they have provided the Pakistani team with some rare high points in a lacklustre all-round performance in the little-more-than-five days of Test cricket in the series so far: Gul's 65* from no. 9 was not only the team's highest score of the first innings of the first Test, it came at a S/R comfortably higher than those around him, a stat that he reproduced in the second innings; his stats as a bowler have been pretty good, too, with 4 wickets at a respectable 31.5. Hameed's single contribution had less of an impact, but his ability to do what very few of his team-mates had done -- actually hold onto a catch -- makes his role in the side a noteworthy one.

Secondly, however, there is the question of the provenance of these two men. Whilst most of the squad are Punjabi by birth -- nearly half were born in Lahore, in the east of the country -- these two hail from Peshawar, in North-Western Frontier Province. For those of you who've been living under a rock, Gul and Hameed could be forgiven for having things other than the thwack of leather on willow on their mind at present: with current statistics for the flooding in Pakistan touching 12 million affected out of a population of 166 million, it doesn't take a vast imaginative leap to consider that these two -- if not a greater number of the tourists -- might have been directly affected in some way.

It seems to be the done thing at the moment, after successive batting collapses of monumentally inept proportions, to lambast the Pakistani cricket team. Well, after five years that have seen a major earthquake in the vicinity, a terrorist attack on a fellow international cricket team in Lahore, and now this month's floods -- not to mention, within the sport, match-fixing allegations, international bans and the rest -- is it any wonder that they're a bit . . . ermm . . . out of sorts?

A couple of days after my recent post about Murali's status as an all-time great, I read a newspaper piece that suggested Warne's career achievements were the greater as he got a lower percentage of his wickets against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. I think if the recent travails of the Pakistanis show us anything, they serve as a reminder that the fortunes of all international cricket teams rise and fall -- West Indies after 2003 would be a good example, but England teams of the 90s and early 00s were fairly shocking, too -- and for reasons that don't always have everything to do with the sport. This is the beauty of international cricket: that it is at one and the same time a serious business for millions of people, and something that -- when faced with the natural and political disasters of certain regions of the world -- matters not a jot.