A Collective Failure to Fail

Bob Woolmer passed away two nights back.

The news is yet to sink in, and it will be quite some time before we can come to grips with a tragedy of such enormous proportions, but the usual process of post-posthumously extolling a man who was the source of such considerable consternation and ire till a few hours back has begun. The carrion-seekers have been forced into silence, cricket’s enfant terrible has gone on record to talk about how shaken he is, and even the men in green have been stirred out of their pall of indifference and lethargy to mutter a few choice words of grief. One suspects a slew of more eloquently phrased articles will follow, lavishing praise on Woolmer’s contributions to cricket, and rightly so; seldom has any man dedicated himself so wholly to a cause from cradle to grave.

But I digress…

The purpose of this article is not to eulogize an individual who undertook his responsibilities with a commitment and poise that was light-years beyond the qualities associated with his predecessors. Tears by bards and heroes may indeed immortalize men, but only in death. Instead, the fiasco that was Pakistan’s failed bid to reclaim former cricketing glory raises an important question, one that has scope beyond the sport itself; why are we so ungracious, to an extent even dismally delusive, in our acceptance of failure?

I’ve followed cricket fanatically since the 1996 tour of England, when the sight of Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram, Mushtaq Ahmed and Saeed Anwar proved altogether too much for an impressionable if idle mind. I cheered every run off Anwar’s blade in Chennai in 1997, pinched myself when Shoaib Akhtar castled Tendulkar with one that dipped and reverse-swung furiously, and barely managed to contain my delight when Pakistan pulled successive rabbits out of the hat during the tour of India in 2005. In between were the low points of the World Cups from 1999 to 2007, the loss to India at home, and broken dreams in the gloom of Chittagong and Karachi. Every match that we won reinforced belief in the oodles of talent flowing through the blood of every young man in the country, while each loss brought with it claims ranging from match-fixing and biased umpiring to the lack of divine providence. We never lost all these years. We were simply made to finish second by forces that conspired against us. Forces, that included every possible conspiracy theory barring the possibility that we simply weren’t good enough. Perish the thought.

The notion of failure being an abject impossibility in an infinitely fair world is one that runs through the very fabric of Pakistani society. Take a step back and glance over the successive generations of history textbooks peppering the prototypical secondary school mind with a perverse version of self-indulgent history. The British succeeded in booting out the Mughals because they were cunning strategists without any moral compunctions regarding the philosophy of divide-and-conquer. Forget the small matter of our rampant technological backwardness and mass ignorance. The implicit assumption being that the British success owed more to debasement than to superiority or strength. Fast-forward a couple hundred years and the fall of Dhaka finds a similarly appropriate champion in Yahya Khan and his perpetually inebriated state. Never mind the fact that only in Frank Miller’s imagination can men consistently defeat armies several orders of magnitude larger.

Switch over to politics, and a similar trend prevails. The Ministry of Water and Power proclaims the Baglihar Dam arbitration an unqualified success, despite the considerable evidence to the contrary. Musharraf appears on the telly with a strangely subdued Kamran Khan, adamant that the sacking of the Chief Justice was a seamlessly orchestrated success-story that saved the country from being ravaged. The opposition benches may change in creed and manifesto, but are historically strung together by the common misfortunate of having fallen foul of election fraud. You get the picture.

Seldom is there weakness to be found in failure.

All this is not to say that the popular beliefs prevailing in the land of the pure are bunk. There are definite shards of truth in the majority of these opinions, but what is particularly galling is the emphasis on minutiae in the absence of introspection and responsibility. Success is often touted as having many fathers, but failure sports an equally rich ancestry. To focus on external causes is to flounder in inactivity.

Ian Chappell made an excellent point the other day on a talk-show organized by Cricinfo. When asked about the fundamental difference between the current English and Australian teams, he went on to state that while both teams were at the bottom of the barrel in the early eighties, the key difference was that the Australian Cricket Board took the bitter pill of accepting mediocrity and set about trying to put their house in order. The English, meanwhile, continued to perpetuate the myth of British superiority. The rest, as they say, is history.

Finally, to come back to where it all began – Robert Andrew Woolmer. History will be merciless in remembering him as the best coach never to win a World Cup, but it was in this imperfection that we learnt most about the man. Perhaps the salient striking aspect to Woolmer’s death was the fact that he took the failure to heart and recognized it for what it was. Ironic, in some sense, that in almost sixty years of proud existence as a nation, the only person who put his hand up and felt responsible was an Englishman.