Pakistan's cricket mirrors suffocation of its civic life

Can we infer that in sports, a team's performance reflects, in some sense, the psychic health of a nation?

- Pavan K Varma

The cricket field is not a parade ground, and batsmen are not infantry obeying orders.

(AFP)

I ask this question after watching the India-Pakistan T20 World Cup cricket match played on 15 February.It was impossible, watching Pakistan's hapless batting collapse, not to wonder whether the problem lay merely in poor strategy or field selection — or in the malaise of a demoralised State. The manner in which the best Pakistani batsmen flailed around, swinging carelessly without thought of resolve or responsibility, seemed to indicate a palpable dispiritedness and diminishing of hope.

Over the past few years, Pakistan has stumbled from one crisis to another: An economy gasping for breath, a polity throttled by military dictatorship, and a citizenry that has learned to live with perennially diminished expectations. The country’s most celebrated cricketer, former Prime Minister Imran Khan, has been languishing in jail, an irony as bitter as it is revealing.

Whether or not one agrees with Khan's politics, his imprisonment represents, for many Pakistanis, a moral wound. It signals a polity at war with its own icons and a system incapable of introspection. The cricket team’s limp performance, lacking cohesion or conviction, seemed almost a subconscious tribute to that paralysis.