Who’d be a Pakistani cricketer?
Life as a Pakistani cricketer is, to put it mildly, a challenge.
If you are a Pakistani cricketer, you are automatically an enigma. This is the only quality that Pakistani cricketers have in their mentality.
If you are performing in the zone it’s because you have all the natural talent in the world, much more so than any Australian. If you are not it’s because you aren’t trying hard enough.
It’s easier for an English cricketer – your form simply means that you are either quite good, utterly rubbish or Ryan Sidebottom. If you are a Pakistani cricketer then there is no such thing as “form” because you are enigmatic. Even your menu choices are met with knowing shrugs and muffled coughs by your foreign dinner companions.
The most lucrative cricket league in the world is Indian. This means that you are forever destined to be decidedly less wealthy than Roelof van der Merwe. Never will you get the opportunity to be damned on TV with faint, patronising praise by Ravi Shastri and Sunny Gavaskar.
The opportunity to aim a vast, swiped DLF Maximum towards Shah Rukh Khan’s head will pass you by. You will never achieve a Citi Moment of Success in your life, ever.
You will never be as popular as Shahid Afridi, even if you are Shahid Afridi.
One day you might be granted the honour of playing international cricket for the Pakistan team. Likely you will be forced to share a room with Shoaib Akhtar and his dubious personal habits.
If you perform badly, you can expect to receive a phone call from Ijaz Butt telling you that you have been banned from the team indefinitely. The cost of this phone call will be deducted from your match fee.
If you are part of a team that suffers some comprehensive overseas defeat, then expect to be hauled before your national leaders to explain yourself. Remember that you are enigmatic, so the incompetence defence will result in you being tortured and imprisoned.
The only possible explanation is that you weren’t trying hard enough due to your enigmatic nature, at which you will be tortured and imprisoned. This is a motivational technique that has never been used on Ian Bell, although the ECB has contracted a company of chartered accountants and convened a working party to consider the idea.
If, miraculously, you manage to avoid this fate throughout a five week period, you will be made captain of the Pakistan team to ensure that you are no longer blameless. Instead, you will be held responsible for everything, ever, including the rising price of oil.
You are, it will be assumed, a cheat and a match fixer. In addition to the above consequences of poor performance, you will forever be accused of losing on purpose in a desperate attempt to become nearly as wealthy as Roelof van der Merwe. Even your team mates and the PCB will assume this, and they will ensure that everyone knows that you were the one that was cheating, not them.
Being an enigma, the world will never accept that you dropped all those catches due to your dodgy footwork or because you lost the ball against the backdrop of the crowd.
If you have ever moved the ball in the air, even in the nets, you will forever attract the undue attention of television producers. They will always have a camera on you when you are walking back to your mark or fielding at long leg. Under no circumstances should you pick you nose on the field of play as you will be accused of altering the condition of the ball by using a foreign substance and the match referee will trouser your wages.
The final insult will come when Ijaz Butt telephones your mother and tells her that you have been banned from cricket forever, and you will be pelted with rotten tomatoes whenever you step foot outside Pakistan. Your name will never be referenced in televised cricket commentary anywhere in the world ever again, without the additional use of the words “shame”, “controversy”, “disgraceful” or “alleged”.
But apart from that, being a Pakistani cricketer is ok.
Comments:
3