Watching television is at the best of times a hazardous movement. Last year, however, I thought being actually sick. The manifestation of worldwide cricket stars and our own idols being “sold” was a disgusting nightmare. It was both rude and insipid as millions of dollars were thrown around in the name of jazzing up cricket. Obviously, people like me will be sacked as conservative sticklers declining to come to requisites with the usual development of the sport in the age of globalization. We were told this was an evolution, it was what the public needs, and this was a way how club cricket perched to shatter the manacles of constricted nationalism. Hence, accommodate or shut up.

My annoyance is directed at the BCCI which visualized, organized and supervised over this prime-time rape of the game. The staffs, which run the BCCI, past and present, have much to answer for, but President Sharad Pawar and his followers are mainly guilty. They must enlighten how this fatal parody of the game is in the best welfare of cricket. The richest board in the world must make clear why it desires still more money—to do what? Undoubtedly, not to encourage the game across the country, Also, not to help and back up other sports very much impoverished for cash.

Lalit Modi ruined NZ cricket. Thanks to him one of the finest fast bowlers in the world (Shane Bond) can’t play international cricket. BCCI are scum of the earth. The BCCI put massive pressure on all boards to ban ICL contacted players. As the BCCI has all cash, and the ICC is basically run by them, the boards are too scared to go against them. The BCCI are bullies, and basically bullied NZ cricket to end Shane Bond’s international career. You need to open your eyes and realize that the BCCI is slowly destroying cricket. If it was up to Modi then they’d be nothing but 20/20 cricket. As I say, scum of the earth.
ICC is not more than a puppet in the hands of BCCI. IPL is legalized by BCCI and ICC because they are filling their pockets. I hope some day cricket would be given priority as a sport rather than a money making machine. It annoys me so much how cricket nations pander to the BCCI. Take the recent India/NZ series for an example. Anyone notice how flat the pitches were compared to last time? NZ cricket knew that they need to keep the BCCI on their side because they have the ££, they were terrified of upsetting the BCCI and not getting any more matches with India, so they made the pitches flat to suit the Indian side. I’m not taking anything away from the Indian side here; they played well and deserved to win.

The BCCI is a critical body unwavering to kill cricket. If anyone is planning a coup d’état in opposition to it, count me in. The current lot must be removed before they impose supplementary damage.

Cricket must do all it can to preserve the most beguiling and unpredictable of nations

It is possible to love the Pakistan cricket team, just as it is possible to hate them. They can play sublimely, they can play disastrously; they play within the laws, and break them at will; they have produced some of the game’s greatest talents, and some of its biggest villains.

Watching Pakistan play cricket is a bit like watching Paul Gascoigne play football. There is always magic, but it is a magic fraught with danger. They force you to the edge of your seat, nails bitten to the quick, never quite sure what crazy thing is going to happen next.

In the late 1990s, if you wanted boring consistency, then watching Australia was the thing: always pressing home the advantage, always winning, usually with a preaching tone to boot. If you wanted textbook cricket, then England was the place to be: left elbow high, and all that, and steady line and length. If you wanted tactical sterility, then you should have gone to South Africa: seam bowlers banging away outside off stump, to rigid field settings. Even West Indies were predictable in their awfulness.

Pakistan, meanwhile, were totally and utterly unpredictable; beguiling, bewitching and, at times, bloody dreadful. They would win gloriously then lose shambolically, each defeat producing convulsions and factions within the camp, the captain blaming the coach and vice versa, before some government minister stepped in and sacked the lot. In a bizarre period between 1992 and 1995 there were nine different captains of the team, the job little more than a prestigious game of pass the parcel.

A list of Pakistan captains in the 1990s is both a gallery of rogues and a roll call of some of the great players of the period: Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Salim Malik, Saeed Anwar. Imran was the father figure by the early part of the decade, the roughest of diamonds who became the most polished of fast bowlers. He was the inspirational figure who urged his team to fight like cornered tigers in the 1992 World Cup when they were on the brink of elimination and who, ultimately, lifted the trophy on a triumphant night in Melbourne. That evening Pakistan showed the rest of the world what was possible if raw, uninhibited talent was given its head.

Imran, and the disciples who followed him, revolutionised the art of fast bowling on dry, unhelpful pitches. Imran had learnt the secrets of reverse swing from another Pakistan fast bowler, Sarfraz Nawaz, and passed them on to Wasim and Waqar, who became one of the great opening partnerships in the history of the game. No other pairing can have been so dangerous with new ball and old, no other fast bowlers have been so skilled at making the old ball move in the air, snaking this way and that, homing in on the toes or the base of the stumps with heat-seeking accuracy. Both had a greater percentage of bowled and leg-before dismissals than any other fast bowlers in the history of the game.

Nothing is ever simple, though, with Pakistan cricket. Rumours circulated that the secrets passed on from generation to generation contained some dark arts, and accusations of ball-tampering flew back and forth. No cricketer who played in that era with eyes open could deny that ball-tampering was rife – Chris Pringle, the New Zealand bowler, admitted to using a bottle top during the tour to Pakistan in 1990 – just as no batsman would deny that, tampered with or not, the ball did magical things in the hands of Wasim and Waqar.

If Pakistan’s quicker bowlers revolutionised the game, so did one of their spinners, Saqlain Mushtaq, the inventor of the “doosra”. The genesis of the doosra, the off spinner’s equivalent of the googly, can be found in the dry, parched pitches of Pakistan. While they provided enough natural wear and tear to encourage reverse swing, they also prevented an off spinner finding the degree of curve that, say, an English off spinner would get in more damp and lush conditions. To beat the outside edge of the bat, then, Saqlain came up with the doosra, flicked over the top with a cocked wrist.

Now, no sub-continental off spinner worth his salt is without a doosra in his armoury: Harbhajan Singh, Muttiah Muralitharan and Ajantha Mendis. But it was Saqlain who paved the way.

How did this team, with wonderful, attacking batsmen and world-class, revolutionary bowlers have such an indifferent, chaotic record in the mid-1990s? Justice Qayyum was given the task of looking into that and his report into match-fixing was about as condemnatory as it was possible to be. Salim Malik was banned for life (and is apparently writing a book lifting the lid on match-fixing in the 1990s) and found guilty of fixing matches against Sri Lanka and Australia. Wasim, it was recommended, should never hold a position of responsibility again. Qayyum reported that there were “sufficient grounds to cast strong doubt” on Mushtaq Ahmed, the England spin-bowling coach.

The impression given of cricket on the sub-continent in the 1990s was of a giant casino, in which the players were addicted gamblers, cricket often taking second place to the demands of bookmakers. Investigating a match in Christchurch in 1994, when Pakistan lost against the odds, Qayyum suspected the worst but could not prove it. He came, instead, to a conclusion that could have summed up Pakistan cricket in that period: “There were misfields, there were wides. The batting collapsed. But then again, that is the Pakistan cricket team,” he said. Indeed.

Nothing, perhaps, sums up the contradictions of Pakistan cricket, and the abyss into which it has descended, better than Miandad. He is the greatest player that Pakistan has produced, without doubt one of the greatest players of the modern era. He is now the director general of the Pakistan Cricket Board, but he has ties, through a family marriage, to a wanted terrorist who was initially at the forefront of match-fixing and who is now linked with the network responsible for the Mumbai bombings in December and who is suspected of carrying out the Lahore massacre. Miandad’s eldest son is married to the daughter of Dawood Ibrahim. whom the US State Department describes as “a global terrorist with links to al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba”.

Pakistan cricket has faced many hurdles over the past two decades, but none bigger than it faces now. Despite all the problems, the loss of Pakistan to the cricket calendar would be a grievous one, for they have encapsulated all that is good and bad in cricket – all that is good and bad in sport.

When you watch cricket played on the streets in Pakistan, you watch the game played in its purest form. No coaches and no textbooks to interfere, just raw talent and passion. That is why it is always likely that Pakistan will produce special cricketers who push the boundaries of what is possible, who perfect the art of something different and who demand that the rest of the world catch on or lose out. It makes Pakistan one of the most precious resources the game has to offer.

It is essential that cricket is not left to wither and die, and that the ICC does its utmost to lend support and nurture Pakistan cricket back to life. It is inconceivable that international cricket can be played in Pakistan in the short term, but there is no reason why we should not delight in watching the next generation of rascals play in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, London and Melbourne. Cricket would be poorer without them.

[ Originally Written by: Mike Atherton, Chief Cricket Correspondent ]

 ”The Total Forex reserves stand at 8.89 billion dollars, out of which commercial banks have 3.38 billion dollars, meaning that the State Bank of Pakistan possesses 5.5 billion dollars,” a local media report today quoted senior Finance Ministry official as saying.

”Out of this 5.5 billion dollars , 1.5 billion dollars have already been consumed because of the forward booking liabilities,” the official added.

Keeping in view the fast depleting foreign reserves, the dollar-rupee parity stands at 1-77, which is alarming. Financial experts are of the view that dollar’s value can cross Rs 80 any time because of the worsening reserves situation and the prevailing political uncertainty.

As far as the government’s request to the World Bank seeking one billion dollar loan is concerned, there is no progress. The bank has, in fact, refused to extend any programme loan. According to official sources, the bank has agreed to extend project loans only.

The World Bank’s top guns have conveyed to the authorities in Pakistan that the bank has linked its future programme loans to the issuance of the Letter of Credit by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The two installments, each of 136 million dollars, from the UAE-based Etisalat Company against the privatisation of the PTCL are now overdue and the government is awaiting the delivery of 272 million dollars. However, there is no progress on this issue.

The government, despite its tall claims, has so far failed to float the Workers Remittances Securitisation Bond worth 750 million dollars to provide cushion to the worsening foreign reserves situation.

On the privatisation front, there seems no tangible progress on sell-off programmes. The government claims that some privatisation proceeds amounting to 1.86 billion dollars are in the pipeline.

The government was earlier claiming that it would have inflows of 250 to 300 million dollars as the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) was going to issue some licenses of that value to various companies in the first quarter of the current fiscal. So far, no progress has been seen on this issue too.

The Abraaj, an Arab group that has become the new administration of the Karachi Electric Supply Company, still has not injected 400 million dollars investment into the company.

”It means the forex reserves would continue to decline in the days to come,” the paper added.

The Idea of Islamic Banking is still hot these days in Pakistan. Either completely new Islamic institute are being emerged or recent traditional banks are opening additional branches focusing in Shariah-based Financing products/services. But still consumers doubt that how much are they Islamic? Three years back, Fazal Ahmed, chief financial officer of the Islamic Investment Bank quoted that “Pakistan followed Malaysia and Bahrain considered the role models of Islamic banking while it formulated its regulations, now Pakistan has the best possible framework for Islamic banking that it can”. But, at the end of the day, government institutions and authorities cannot judge whether they have proved themselves or not while consumers do.

Continue Reading