This is Part 2 of a five-part series in the lead-up to the first Test between Pakistan and West Indies in the UAE, starting on Thursday, looking at the rise of the Pakistan Test team.
It is a conundrum. The better Pakistan play as a Test match side in the UAE, the less people are of a mind to consider the toll it has taken on them.
Among many things, winning, we like to think, breeds team spirit. What it says about homesickness we have no idea because there is no known precedent to what Pakistan’s Test side have undergone over the last seven years.
It is a kind of torture, except it has been made worse by not being actual, undiluted torture. That would be, as one example, the inability of South Africa’s finest talents to play any international cricket at all while their country was banned from global competition during Apartheid.
Over the years, cricket has become blasé about it, occasionally jolted into realising just how much it means when Pakistan win a big contest, or when they tour a country they have not been to for a while.
“Sometimes people think it’s easy, that the UAE suits us and we win,” Misbah-ul-Haq said after Pakistan levelled their series in England in August, the result — along with India’s draw in the Caribbean — took them to No 1.
“But just living every day away from our country, without family and friends, it’s really difficult. It’s mentally tough. I see my mother and sister only once a year and some friends not for three or four years. We are out of the country all of the time.”
• PART 1: David Kendix explains the ranking system
• PART 3: Ajmal, Azhar and Wahab's favourite UAE moments
• PART 4: The secret to Pakistan's UAE success
• PART 5: Misbah-ul-Haq, a record that does not skip
He was not wrong about that last statement. By a rough calculation, until the end of the England tour, Pakistan have been on the road for over 1500 days out of the last 2701 days, or since April 2009, when they played their first ‘home’ series in the UAE — an ODI series against Australia.
That calculation is based on the duration of every international commitment Pakistan have had — bi- and multilateral — plus anywhere between five to 10 days as the time they would normally spend ahead of any commitment for preparation and acclimatisation.
No player has spent all that time outside of course, because not every player has played across formats. But Misbah’s point about not having been able to see family and friends since he became captain begins to ring truer with this number in mind.
And just think about that number — more than half of a period now longer than seven years, one version of the Pakistan team has been playing not in Pakistan.
Sure, the UAE douses the impact of this exile — recall that old quip about the best city to live in India or Pakistan being Dubai. It is as comfortable and familiar an exile as can be arranged, but it is still, at best, only a likeness.
“Home advantage is something we will always miss,” Younis Khan said a few years ago. “I debuted against Sri Lanka and you play on those grounds [in Pakistan] on which you have been playing for years and years and there is the comfort of performing in familiarity.
“Years and years you have trained there, or attended camps. That is an advantage and that you miss.”
Some might argue that the effects of this are overplayed. They stay, after all, in five-star hotels and travel in luxury. The facilities they use for training in the UAE are as good, if not better, than in Pakistan.
There is a little merit to this, as even Younis recognised: this is, he said, what players had worked for their entire lives. And it remains his opinion that it has toughened younger players in the side, such as Azhar Ali and Asad Shafiq, as well as expanded their world views on a life outside cricket and Pakistan.
But imagine travelling that often for your job. There is a reason some corporations have regulations in place controlling the time executives spend on planes. A prolonged existence within the airless whirl of hotels and suitcases can also allow a kind of sensory deprivation to take hold — “the pressure on body and mind” that Younis alluded to.
It is one thing to feel the comfort of performing in front of a home crowd. Pakistan’s situation is such that any crowd will do. Think back to a moment in the Lord’s Test this summer when, as he was about to bowl to Jonny Bairstow, Yasir Shah heard the crowd grow louder and louder in support of the Englishman.
Shah urged them to go louder still, visibly surfing off their energy. He did not care whether he was the villain or hero in this grand theatre, just that he was a part of it.
Would those push-up celebrations have existed at all were there not an audience for them? Even for those curmudgeons who thought it showmanship, how could they begrudge a team that has hardly had a crowd to show off to in seven years?
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