Top of the World - Part II

CHAPTER 16 (cont.)

Australia is a fair distance from Pakistan, and there are no direct flights. In Karachi, I boarded a plane for Singapore, from where I was to take a connecting flight to Canberra. The travel arrangements were rudimentary. There was an 8-hour stopover in Singapore, which I spent hanging around the airport, unsuccessfully searching for some comfort. I eventually reached Canberra late in the evening local time. The next day Pakistan were scheduled to meet South Africa in a friendly unofficial match. Imran wanted me to play in that game, but I was dog-tired and jet-lagged, and politely but firmly declined.

The unofficial game with South Africa was to be followed by a friendly against Sri Lanka. This one I did play, and made 89. My back was better and now I had also made some runs in a practice match. I was ready for the World Cup to begin.

The tournament was to be played as a Round Robin League, in which all the teams play each other once. There being 9 teams, this meant a total of 36 matches in the preliminary stage. The top four teams would then progress to the semi-finals.

The competition’s rules called for each team to name a 14-member squad at the beginning of the tournament, after which no changes would be allowed except on account of injury. Pakistan’s 14-strong contingent was a mix of experience and youth. Imran was captain and I was asked to be vice-captain, which I accepted. A demoralizing omission was that of Waqar Younis, who had been diagnosed with a stress fracture of the back and was unavailable for the duration of the tournament. Waqar was by this time one of the frontline fast bowlers in the world, and everyone felt his absence was a significant blow to our chances.

A number of our players were in mid-career. Players like Rameez Raja, Saleem Malik, Ijaz Ahmed and Wasim Akram had already participated in the 1987 World Cup and they combined talent with a good deal of international experience. For other players – Aamir Sohail, Moin Khan, Aaqib Javed, Mushtaq Ahmed and Inzamam-ul-Haq – it was to be their first World Cup. These were promising youngsters and much was expected of them. Inzamam, especially, was very green and had made his One-Day International debut only a couple of months before. He would play a memorable role in our World Cup campaign even though at the start of the tournament his limited-overs career was only 7 matches old.

Imran by this time was 39 years old, and I was 35. We were among the oldest players in the tournament. We were also the most experienced in World Cup terms: Imran and I were the only two players in the entire competition who had played in each of the previous four World Cups.

At the start of the tournament, Australia were the favorites. The Australians certainly had a solid team and would be playing with the home advantage. They were also the World Cup title-holders, having lifted the Cup in the 1987 final at Calcutta. One of the Australian newspapers published an analysis that since the 1987 World Cup, Australia had won 75% of their limited-overs international games, which was a winning percentage far ahead of the other teams. It was an impressive statistic, but many of us knew that the World Cup tournament had little respect for such predictive reasoning.

Besides Australia, the other teams being mentioned as favorites were England and Pakistan. And after the tournament’s opening match, when New Zealand comfortably defeated Australia by 37 runs, everyone sat up and took notice of them too. New Zealand had come to the competition with method, strategy and singular determination, and it forced everyone to treat them with great respect.

Our own World Cup got off to a terrible start. Of our first 5 matches, we lost 3 – one each to West Indies, India and South Africa. We would also have lost a fourth match, against England, but for rain. The only game we won in that early phase was the one against Zimbabwe, who were not yet a Test side. The way we played in those initial games, it seemed we wouldn’t even manage a semi-final spot.

Our team appeared to be going through the World Cup matches as if they were just in another practice camp. Team morale was extremely low and no one seemed to be playing with any passion. Waqar was already unavailable, and now Imran too had a shoulder injury. All of a sudden our bowling was looking very ordinary indeed.

After losing 3 of those first 5 matches, we squared off against Australia at Perth on March 11, 1992. The final was scheduled exactly two weeks later at the MCG. To lift the World Cup title from that point, we would have to win every single game, and even then our chances of getting into the semi-finals would depend on the outcome of other matches that didn’t involve Pakistan and over which we had no control. There was no longer any room for error, and even if we played perfect cricket from then on, we would still be at the mercy of things beyond our control. By the time of our Round Robin match against Australia – our 6th match – we had reached the point where it was no more just up to us – we were in need of divine intervention.

Beginning with that game against Australia at Perth, Pakistan’s fortunes underwent a dramatic transformation. The outcomes of matches between other teams also played out in our favor, and the permutations ended up securing a semi-final berth for Pakistan.

I have a firm belief that this miraculous turnaround for Pakistan was Allah’s answer to the heartfelt prayers of millions of our compatriots. Then, too, March 1992 was no ordinary time for prayer. It happened to be Ramadan, a time of great blessing and the holiest month in the Muslim year.

In fact it was heavenly intervention – quite literally – that had kept our chances alive even up to the time we met Australia. Had we not split a point each in the game against England (our 4th match of the competition), we would no longer have been in contention.

Rain had saved us. This Round Robin match against England was played at the Adelaide Oval on March 1. England won the toss and put us in without hesitation, on what appeared to be a dangerous seaming track. Imran was injured for that match and I took over as captain.

The wicket lived up to our expectations, and more. The sky was also overcast and the conditions suited England’s seam and swing attack perfectly. We were down 2 wickets for 5, then 4 wickets for 20, and were at one point 7 down for 42, in danger of eclipsing Canada’s record of 45 as the lowest One-Day International innings in history.

We eventually managed 74, in the process establishing a couple of low-scoring records. This figure remains the lowest total by a Test-playing country in World Cup matches, and was at the time our lowest-ever innings in limited-overs cricket.

A target of 74 in a One-Day International match is for all purposes a mere formality. Our innings had finished well before lunchtime. England came out to bat before lunch and had reached 17 for 1 by the interval.

Then the skies grew dark and the heavens opened. It was quite unexpected. It hadn’t rained in Adelaide for the previous three months, but now it was coming down in torrents. Soon the outfield was drenched and the match had to be abandoned. Despite batting like an inept school team, we had still managed to garner a crucial point from this match and it kept us in the running. Give any explanation you like, to me it was the hand of God that saved us.

Three days later, we met India at Sydney. It was the usual tense affair, with both teams out for each other’s blood. Our World Cup campaign was up against the ropes and it made us nervous and edgy. Meeting India had of course its own set of anxieties. All these things kept us from playing up to our potential in that game.

Many people, myself included, remember that match for a testy exchange that went on between the Indian wicket keeper, Kiran More, and me. More was appealing for everything in sight, and was being a real nuisance. His incessant ranting was making it difficult for me to concentrate. I complained to one of the umpires, who instructed More to zip it up.

Of course this only managed to get More even more worked up. His frequent appealing was bad enough, but it was the constant chatter he kept up whenever he wasn’t appealing that got to me. He would go on about what the Indians were going to do, how they were going to overwhelm us, and how all my efforts were going to amount to nothing. It was all delivered in rather colorful Urdu, and it was making it impossible for me to concentrate. We had been set a target of 217, and I had walked in with our innings at 17 for 2. I had a difficult job to do as it was, but More’s antics made it harder than it needed to be.

I finally turned around and confronted More.

“Talk and appeal all you want, Kiran,” I told him, “but stay quiet once the bowler has taken his start and I have settled into my stance.”

For a while after that, More put a lid on it, but then he started again. It was extremely annoying. Obviously, words – from myself as well as from one of the umpires – hadn’t got through to More. So I decided to make fun of his antics and jumped around the wicket like a kangaroo to ape how excitable he had become. It was captured by all the TV cameras and by a number of photographers. It became one of the images of the 1992 World Cup.

I made 40 in that game and shared an 88-run partnership with Aamir Sohail that took us from 17 for 2 to 105. But after Aamir left, the rest of our batting began to collapse around me. We lost our last 8 wickets for just 68 runs and fell short of the Indian target by 43. The Indians were naturally overjoyed. We slunk back to our hotel to lick our wounds.

Our next match was four days later, against South Africa on March 8. On March 5, however, the day following the match against India, I started experiencing stomach pains. At first I thought it was just stomach flu, and didn’t pay much attention. The team had to travel to Brisbane for the game against South Africa and I went with them. When we got to Brisbane, I began vomiting. The pain in my abdomen was so severe that it was obvious I needed medical attention.

Initially, the problem couldn’t be undiagnosed. Then after an endoscopy test it was diagnosed as gastritis – inflammation of the stomach lining. The gastroenterologist explained that the pain medication I had been taking for my back was to blame. That medication, while very effective in controlling my backaches, had as one of its major side-effects stomach inflammation and bleeding. Unfortunately, I had been taking the medicine rather liberally and had developed this complication.

The medical advice was to rest and to start a new medicine that reduced acid production in the stomach. I had been slowly internally bleeding, and was consequently feeling very weak. Reluctantly, I followed the doctor’s orders and sat out the match against South Africa.

Rameez Raja was also missing from that match because of a sore shoulder. Even though our batting was depleted, we still felt we had a fair shot against South Africa, who were re-entering international cricket after two decades in the wilderness due to the apartheid boycott.

This time, though, the rain worked against us. Set to chase 212 from 50 overs to win the match, our reply was interrupted by rain with our score at 74 for 2 in the 21st over. When play resumed, the target was revised to 120 from just 14 overs. Before the rain, our asking rate had been 4.76 per over; after the rain interruption it became an astronomical 8.57 an over. The revision was based on the most expensive overs bowled by us in the South African innings, as dictated by a rule being followed in that particular competition.

It was a silly rule – there is no other way to describe it. On this occasion, it helped South Africa, who went on to win that match as we inevitably faltered in our chase. (But if you live by the sword you die by the sword too. Applied to its ridiculous extreme, the same rain rule would keep South Africa out of the tournament final after they had nearly beaten England in one of the semi-final matches.)