Nobody expects professional athletes to be well informed about the world they live in, not today. The world is not especially well informed about itself so why should we expect its sportsmen to be?
Those who are a little worldlier are the outliers. Those who have well-formed views about society around them, who are able to articulate those views and hold to their stances, they are gold dust and one of the greatest of them, as of this year, is no longer with us.
But the durability of the bubbles in which they live never fails to astound. Take the aftermath of Pakistan's win at Lord's earlier this week over England, a win they celebrated by orchestrating a tribute to the military boot camp the team underwent before arriving in England.
That was all it was – a tribute to folk who had worked very hard to get the team into shape, to folk whose day jobs are slightly riskier than the average cricketer’s, and also a tribute to a special time and place in which the team bond’s grew stronger.
First came an arrow from Tim Bresnan, in the guise of a tweet: “That might bite you, boys. Carma [sic] catches up with you eventually. It did with the Sprinkler.”
See also:
• Osman Samiuddin: Mohammed Amir makes his Test return with a rather humble bow at Lord's
• Osman Samiuddin: Younis Khan's knock against England at Lord's ugly but admirable
• Yasir Shah: Misbah tribute to Messi-lookalike after Pakistan crush England in Lord's Test
The reference was to the dance England jigged after winning the Ashes in Australia in 2010-11; if Bresnan thinks it was the resulting karma of that celebration that had them whitewashed a few years later and not, you know, Mitchell Johnson, then that says more about England’s decline at the time than Bresnan imagined.
A little later at the post-match press conference, Alastair Cook was asked whether the celebrations had offended him. “I didn’t take any offence but certainly at that emotive time it’s not pleasant viewing,” he responded. “Certainly when you’ve lost a game of cricket that first 20 minutes or so it’s not pleasant. They’re entitled to do what they want and obviously it’s united them and it’s shown us what a challenge we’ve got.”
Had he left it at that – that the celebrations per se were not unpleasant, just the emotion of having lost at Lord’s – it would have been fine. But as he signed off with a related reference to the “cricketing gods” he left a bitter passive-aggressive aftertaste; one, it is not unreasonable to think, aligns with the thinking behind Bresnan’s tweet.
Finally, in his Daily Mail column Jonny Bairstow had his say. "It was interesting to watch Pakistan's exuberant celebrations ... and we will see how that approach pans out for them during the rest of this series."
It was interesting Jonny, though "approach" is also an interesting way to put it, implying as it does – as do Bresnan and Cook – that Pakistan have somehow calculatedly riled up England. This is a deluded kind of self-flattery is what it is, for Pakistan's celebrations had nothing at all to do with England and most certainly were not gloating.
Maybe it is better if we give this particular bubble a name: let’s call it “Big Three Privilege”. As a form of governance, the Big Three way is dead, but the mentality will not go so easily.
In this, English and Australian players in particular seem to know or care little about teams and players and challenges that are not English, Australian, or Indian. An inoffensive manifestation of this was the surprise expressed by Michael Clarke two years ago on learning that Younis Khan had not, by then, played 100 Tests.
This privilege blinds its players to, for instance, the context behind Pakistan’s celebrations. That is not rocket science; it is not even geopolitics. These are the fortunes of another team that plays the same sport you do. And in this format, let us remind ourselves, there are only 10 teams (and really nine).
This was a huge occasion for Pakistan. The return to Lord’s after six years of course, but also because they have been on the outer for so long. Few of this squad would have played in the kind of atmosphere they helped create at Lord’s, with full houses and the world’s eyes on them for cricket reasons.
To then win a gripping, tight Test, at the home of cricket, for the first time in 20 years, on their first major foreign challenge in three years – I mean the occasion moved Misbah-ul-Haq to go crazy with the celebrations for his hundred so there was a clue right there how much it meant.
If there was an element of showmanship to it, who can seriously begrudge them that? How often in the past six years have Pakistan played a Test in front of a crowd as big as this?
In fact, it takes some churlishness to find something to rub up wrong against in this Pakistan side, this of all Pakistan sides, led by Misbah, and peopled by quiet achievers such as Asad Shafiq and Rahat Ali.
Maybe England are really just using the celebrations as an imagined slight to motivate themselves for the rest of the series. If that is true, somebody needs to ask why England are not sufficiently motivated in the first place.
Follow us on Twitter @NatSportUAE
Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/TheNationalSport
