Mobilizing the 12th man

It is a world that is fragmented by the haves and have nots — those that have peace, and the rest, sitting in territories ravaged by extremism and war. Like Carlo Ancelotti says of football, sport sits in the middle of it all as the “most important of the less important things”. Sometimes, it has no other option but to surrender, while in some others, it stands up as a sign of resilience.

Pakistani cricket, rightly so, is the headline maker at this hour. But, before we get there, a quick detour, all the way to Tunisia. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, peace seemed, and in some parts, still seems, like a thing of the distant past. CS Hammam-Lif ply their trade in the country’s top division in football, where fans are banned from entering the stadium for safety reasons. On the eve of a crucial fixture that would decide their season, they did something that still sounds too awesome to be true.

Pakistan, over the past few years, has had millions of such twelfth men, cheering its national team from afar. They could go watch domestic games all they wanted, but for what? Even more crucially, what were the players gunning for? A whole young generation, over this period, would have not known what it is like to watch their national team play in front of their eyes.

How this tour has begun is an achievement by itself. The ICC deemed it unfit for its umpires to travel to the country. The Zimbabweans, desperate for an away tour, themselves took a few backward steps, before agreeing at the eleventh hour.

Some other PCB took charge of this series, a PCB we all have not seen in our lifetimes. Tickets were made accessible in supermarkets and public places, and team selection was surprisingly devoid of controversies. The Zimbabweans tweeted out their nerves, from airports, to training sessions.

And after all this, the game happened today, after what seems like ages. The 12th men thronged in their thousands, and the crowd sounded like a combination of late-90s Sharjah and World Cup ’96 Bangalore.

#CricketComesHome trended like there was nothing else to talk about. Sport is a thing of joy when individual performances light up a fully packed stadium, a thing of agony for a team loses a close encounter, and a source of great frustration when a wicket’s taken off a no-ball or a goal is declared offside. And yet, it is at its very best on a day like this, when it does not matter who wins, when it makes a statement of resilience amid chaos in everything else about real life.

Pakistan, the mercurial side that they are, duly converted a cruise home into a humdinger, as if to tell their countrymen nothing had changed in the interim. Boom Boom Afridi, the darling of the crowds, came on and hit one into the stands to finish it off. Not very often in competitive sport are pre-written scripts a good thing. This one, if ever such an utterance could be made with joy, was a perfectly written script to bring the game back to one of its citadels. It is too early to say, but touch all the wood in the world, this would not be an aberration but the start of normal service resumption.

The public, the youth, and the players deserve no less.