Cricket must do all it can to preserve the most beguiling and unpredictable of nations
Mike Atherton, Chief Cricket Correspondent
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.