This week I have been thinking about Arif Ali Abbasi, a Pakistani administrator of the 1980s and 1990s whose go-getting ways were so go-getting that he went and commercialised Pakistan cricket like no other administrator before him.
Abbasi saab, or “Boss”, as I like to call him partly in deference, partly in familiarity, is still working in Karachi, still the “Boss”, 20 years after arranging what was, until then, the biggest windfall in Pakistani cricket.
That was the 1996 World Cup, held in Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, which was the most profitable in the days before the ICC ran the event. Every board, not least the main duo of India and Pakistan, came away from it plenty enriched.
Abbasi – as the late Mike Marqusee captured so observantly in War Minus the Shooting, his book on that tournament – talked the talk and preferred to strut the walk. When he met Marqusee, he told him the cricket world is changing and that the English had better get used to it.
“The future of the game is shifting to the subcontinent,” he said. “The geography of cricket is changing and the game will never be the same.”
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There was actually much wrong with the board at the time, not least a ticketing scandal at that very event.
And that year, remember, was at the height of cricketing corruption, a lot of it within the Pakistan side.
Nevertheless, he reeled off to Marqusee Pakistan’s many contributions and ideas for the ICC, an organisation he spoke of as if offended that it had not, by now, become his fiefdom.
Power was shifting to the subcontinent, note, not just India, so that back then, the future was one Pakistan would dominate.
Abbasi’s bluster, and underlying denial, his sharp eyes and deep voice, in my mind, remains the most potent symbol of those years.
Who knew? Who knew then that the 1996 World Cup final, in Lahore, would be the last World Cup game Pakistan would host for at least 31 years (according to the current cricket calendar)?
Or that the board’s standing would plummet so low and not lower because there are only 10 major boards to the bottom of which you can sink?
Who knew it would fail to adequately handle not one, but two episodes of corruption?
Or that, one day, it would not be able to host international matches at all? All this is especially relevant in a week in which the inaugural Pakistan Super League (PSL) begins.
If it goes well, then potentially it is the start of a long road back to the eminence of Abbasi’s time. Can any such league have meant more to a country than the PSL does to Pakistan?
The Indian Premier League was merely the coronation of Indian cricketing might, a logical outcome of its economic growth and that of the country.
The Big Bash League is in a seminal moment, but it is exactly the kind of product you should expect from a country as good at sports as Australia.
Of the others, maybe only the Caribbean Premier League is so linked to a bigger picture of regeneration.
Ironically though, in fortifying regional identities, it could have unforeseen repercussions for West Indies as the international team we know.
For Pakistan, this first PSL is as much a response as it is anything. It is a response to frankly over-dramatic and misplaced fears about the health of the game, voiced mostly by those who see it merely as a sport in a country and not for what it is – a liquid flowing through the land’s arteries.
Pakistan will have to end for cricket to do so.
That the PSL is taking place at all, that franchises have been sold and an attractive enough international roster of players and coaches roped in is proof enough of cricket’s health.
There is little point belittling its financial value compared to other leagues, unless you make allowances for the economies those leagues operate in.
What seems more pertinent, ahead of this first season, is that the PCB has pulled this together.
This is, by many measures, the biggest event they have organised since that World Cup and it means, reassuringly, they are still capable of it.
One little-seen impact of no international cricket in Pakistan, as one senior official once pointed out, was the stunted development of officials who no longer had a chance to oversee, operationally, a big series or tournament and interact with other sports management professionals.
It is worth bearing that in mind as the league progresses.
They have gotten here with a small team stretched to their farthest limits, in a board unused to organising such ventures and part of which was initially resistant to the entire idea, and at a foreign venue.
Had he been involved, Abbasi saab would have made sure you knew just getting here was a triumph in itself.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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