In our childhood, we didn’t have a TV, nor any tape recorders or radios. At that time, we hadn’t watched cricket on TV or heard in the form of commentary. It was probably 1979 when I first saw cricket on TV at PAF Base Masroor.
Jeffrey Boycott and David Gower were on the crease. We were enjoying this first experience in a daze, thinking that today we will see for the first time who wins and how the real matches are won. But the overs were kept delivering and they were defending constantly. We have never seen anything worse than a Jeffrey boycott on the cricket pitch.
So I asked a passing airman. “When will the match end?” The answer blew my mind, which was something like “four days later.” We ran straight home. Although the first time I saw David Gower and Jeffrey Boycott was on TV, our first love of cricket came a year or two later with Vivian Richards. As a boy, I kept a picture of Vivian in my pocket for a long time, in which he was seen coming out of the field holding a bat.
One of our strange misfortunes was that we could barely get a few minutes to watch the match. And whenever we came to watch it, the Pakistani team would be fielding. It took a while to see my team batting. But when I first saw the Pakistani team batting, Majid Khan and Zaheer Abbas were on the crease.
When I saw Zaheer batting with spectacles, I was surprised that when we are batting with our toy-type spectacles, why can’t we see the ball? Of the two, we fell in love with Zaheer because he was convinced of Richards. There was no answer to his hook and Pull. But soon he was dismissed.
Later, a time came when we were grown up. Thus, whenever Pakistan had a one-day match, we would take a leave from the madrassa under the pretext of illness and go to Sher Shah restaurants to watch the match on TV. The owners of those restaurants turned off the TV every half hour. Soon the people sitting for the match left, they again turned on the TV after ten or fifteen minutes.
Once upon a time, there was a ban on our sick leave. So we bought a pocket-size radio for 125 rupees, along with an earphone. The Pakistani team was on a tour of India. There was an ODI match in Calcutta and it was around three or four o’clock in the afternoon. We set the frequency of the match and put the earphones in the radio side pocket.
And to protect the radio from the eyes of the teacher, I wrapped a handkerchief on my neck in the style of a Shaykh-ul-Hadith. In this match, Saleem Malik was batting again on the crease with a broken arm. Maninder Singh was bowling on one side and Kapil Dev on the other. The match was very thrilling and we listened to that commentary with full patience.
In these critical moments of the match, we were overwhelmed and we forgot that we were sitting in the classroom and the lesson was going on. It is not difficult to imagine the consequences of the involuntary “six” that came out of our mouths. But the late Maulana Abdul Majeed was a very gentle man. He only confiscated the Radio and left us.
Our own cricket was in vogue at that time, which was tape ball. Now the time had come when Pakistan had won that miserable World Cup, the punishment of which we are all suffering. If we had known that this World Cup had brought the PTI, then by God we would never have expressed that happiness which we can do nothing but regret.
Sadness was just one thing during 1992 World Cup. And that we were fans of Waqar Younis instead of Wasim Akram and he was not in the squad because of injury. I went to the stadium for the first time in the mid-90’s and watched the match. The idea was that if people buy very expensive tickets and watch the match in the stadium, then surely it will be something else.
We went to watch the Pakistan-South Africa match at the Pindi Cricket Stadium and took popcorn with us. During the match, when we take out the popcorn, all of a sudden everyone screams. We look up at the pitch and find out that the player is out. Sitting there, we promised that in the future, if someone asks us to sit in the dressing room and watch the match, we will not accept it.
Our last love among Pakistani superstars was Inzamam-ul-Haq. After his retirement, I had rarely seen the match on TV. Now nature does not go that way. Our passion for cricket, which began with David Gower and Jeffrey Boycott, has impressed no one more than Brian Lara. He used to write poetry with a bat.
There is no sign of arrogance in the face or body language of Lara. If the bowler teased, he would give a big reaction with a slight smile. The record of 365 runs in Test cricket which was broken a year later, he renamed it after ten months by scoring 400 runs. This innings is enough to prove that he is a great cricketer, but the most important thing is that he was in the West Indies team at a time when it was almost grounded.
The worst thing about cricket that I dislike is that the analysis in every drawing-room after the match. If so-and-so would be sent to one down and so-and-so to seventh, or if the last over was bowled by that bowler, we would have won easily.
