My first memory of any sport is from 1996 when the cricketing world came to Lahore for the world cup. A first trip to Gaddafi, for Pakistan v New Zealand, proved to be fairly educational. I discovered, for instance, that a cricket pitch was considerably longer than my driveway, and that actual boundaries are at a much greater distance than perceived by a 7 year old’s geometric imagination. 

But most of all, I returned home with the unreasonably strong conviction – courtesy Salim Malik - that a personal world-conquering triumph was just around the corner. Unfortunately, Ajay Jadeja’s corporal punishment at the tailend of the first innings, and Amir Sohail’s untimely boundary pointing, punctured those convictions quite crudely at the quarter final stage. For me, as for many others in my general age range, that night ended in tears. I ended up going to the final to see Sri Lanka beat Australia, but felt nothing. I have no memory of that evening beyond it being extremely well-lit.

There have been other heartbreaks at more decisive stages. 1999 Lord’s, 2007 Johannesburg, and 2011 Mohali were all cruel in their own ways. But 1996 Bangalore was scarring at a more fundamental, formative level. It set up a pattern of emotional investment and episodic heartbreak that’s continued across three decades. I suspect this is true for most Pakistani millennials.

The complexity of my relationship with the Pakistan team is anchored in something a bit heavier than just their performance. It also extends to the broader question of nationalism and tribalism that accompany any form of sporting attachment. 

A certain strand of the progressive worldview – a camp that I broadly identify myself with – sees the Pakistan cricket team as a project of centralized nation-building, designed to cultivate deference to the state. As a result - this critique goes -  it flattens alternative ways of being,  primarily regional ethno-linguistic, and to a lesser extent, sectarian and religious. The historical dominance of players from the heartlands (Punjab and Karachi) and the preponderance of Sunni religious influence through the Tableeghi Jamaat is usually wheeled out as proof.

Sporting teams tracked as a vessel for nationalist politics is a fairly basic observation. Cricket, like all forms of social activity, is political. In our case, it’s just that the political undertone becomes a lot more overt. Despite several efforts at reform, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) is still directly controlled by the government. The military leans on the board for the purposes of garnering legitimacy through bizarre training exercises, and, more obviously, to disburse patronage. Politicians lobby for players, coaches, and even selectors. The Pakistan Super League was developed and sold as a national brand, with plenty of state resources involved in running and securing it. Zimbabwe’s visit in 2015, the first to Pakistan after a terrorism-induced hiatus of 6 years, was cited as proof of the country having turned a corner on the security front. Test cricket returned in 2019 after a decade away to underwrite similar claims.

It bears mentioning that none of this complexity is particularly exceptional to cricket or to Pakistan. Sporting spectacles remain an active site for papering over harsh realities and projecting political fantasies everywhere, including in our immediate neighbourhood. The 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, for example, were a very expensive advert for India’s progress under two decades of neoliberal reforms. Less an advert and more an inadvertent documentary, the event was accompanied by mass displacements for venue construction, labour law violations, and significant financial malfeasance.

Even in the context of the Champions Trophy, BCCI’s refusal to play in Pakistan, or the removal of Pakistan’s name from the tournament jersey, are intensely political acts, borne out of the close relationship between their cricket board and the right-wing BJP regime.

But to dismiss the critique on the basis of universality or merely as a figment of the perma-critical liberal imagination is also misplaced. Whichever way one cuts it, cricket in Pakistan has taken up more than its fair share of state patronage, private and public resources, and media attention compared to any other type of sporting endeavour. It took the single greatest feat by a Pakistani athlete of any kind in Paris last year to turn the public conversation away from cricket, and even then, the prospects for sustained support and a clean-up of other sport governance bodies remain dim.

There is also the matter of securing the sport in a context marred by raging violence in large parts of the country’s western peripheries. The scale of security deployment for international cricket turns host cities into insulated islands of militarized sovereignty. And yet at the same time, many in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa face another type of militarization, one that only perpetuates insecurity. The enforced calm for a cricket match, induced with thousands of police and paramilitary personnel, sits awkwardly (and in glaring view) of both state and non-state violence elsewhere.

However, most of what’s been discussed here can hardly be ascribed to the players, or to the actual conduct of the sport itself. Cricket remains the only truly national pastime, and a source of enjoyment in a country that otherwise offers few. Its demographics at the highest level are also far more diverse now than at any point in the past, thanks to an influx of talent from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the increased visibility of the women’s team.

If anything, cricket in Pakistan is far poorer for having to secure the expectations not just of a one-sport audience, but of legitimacy obligations placed on it by successive insecure regimes and an inept board. 

In the midst of a major tournament, the country’s first in two decades, it makes sense to reflect on how the Champions Trophy will sit with questions of regime legitimacy, violence and insecurity, and the broader issue of nationalism. But to dismiss the sport outright, to discard the (occasional) euphoria the team induces, and to suppress the emotions it still invokes, on account of a series of unwarranted external burdens would be far too harsh. 

The country has gone through a tough decade, with a faltering economy, skyrocketing inflation, and the repeated dashing of political rights, expectations, and aspirations. A tournament isn’t going to fix any of these things, but it will hopefully offer some respite, and a heady dose of joy, to a nation that desperately needs it.