With Pakistan hosting its first ICC event in almost thirty years, the grounds continuously blasted out various purpose-built songs meant to function as stadium anthems. Music has a very influential space in Pakistani cricket in particular, and it is a relationship that is also several decades strong at this point. But while there are many anthems associated with Pakistan cricket - and sports in general - are any of them actually good?

Like most good political anthems, a great sporting anthem isn’t often made with that intention. Take for example the song Alright by American rapper Kendrick Lamar, which was spontaneously adopted by protesting crowds during the Black Lives Matter protests in the US a few years ago. The song was intensely political in nature, but its adoption as a protest anthem seemed to happen organically.

When it comes to sports, football in particular has a long history of songs sung by fans. The phenomenon has been well-documented amongst English fans, though my favourite example by far are the spine-tingling anthems Moroccan fans have historically sung for Palestine. But even in football, as well as other sports like basketball, American football, athletics, tennis and many others today, one of the most popular stadium anthems is Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes.

This song’s ubiquity at sporting events also helps lay out what in my opinion is the single most important feature in most popular sporting anthems: a non-verbal chorus. In the case of Seven Nation Army, the long guitar riff in the song becomes a chorus that the crowd shouts along to. No one needs to remember the lyrics, because the part that is chanted has none - instead it’s just shouting along to the music, which almost anyone can do. That explains what the stadium anthem’s basic purpose is - to get everyone to come together at once. Using a chant with no words is by far the easiest way to do so.

With this rule in mind, it becomes quite easy to analyse why certain songs have been more popular and have endured as cricket anthems compared to others. Just about every popular example has some version of this non-verbal chorus, although as we will eventually see, it is not a guarantee of a song’s success.

Pakistani cricket in particular has had a long association with music. Cricket truly exploded in popularity in the late 80s (you can use Javed Miandad’s iconic last-ball six in 1986 as one marker), and arguably became the biggest cultural pastime following the 1992 World Cup win. This was also the beginning of the explosion of pop music (defined here as non-film music made with Western instruments and styles) in Pakistan, which arguably peaked with the Vital Signs song, Dil Dil Pakistan.

Almost forty years later, this still remains the song most closely associated with Pakistan cricket, especially when it plays abroad. DJs in stadiums in England and Australia, for example, love playing this song which always gets the Pakistani fans going, but also has a chorus simple enough for foreigners to pick up as well.

Like Seven Nation Army, Dil Dil Pakistan was adopted by cricket fans rather than expressly written as a sports anthem. But of course, the virulently patriotic nature of the song made its adoption by the national team’s fans quite understandable.

In the aftermath of the ‘92 win, cricket songs became a popular feature of the pop landscape. One reason for this was structural - this was the era of cassette tapes, and musicians had to fill up 40 to 60 minutes of music in each album to avoid leaving empty spaces. Consequently, many albums of that era would often feature patriotic tracks and occasional cricket anthems just as fillers. At least, that is the charitable explanation for the existence of songs like Junoon’s Game of Chance, which is a gloriously cringeworthy celebration of Imran Khan’s cricket career.

But cricket songs were also a great way for musicians to tap into fans’ eagerness to celebrate. Saleem Javed understood that dynamic perfectly, having released a song on Javed Miandad after his Sharjah six which did well enough for him to feature it on his album cover for “Chor Lover”.

Ten years later, as Pakistan embarked on their title defence in the 1996 World Cup, he had another anthem out which didn’t do quite as well. However, that tournament perhaps solidified the cricket-pop nexus in Pakistan, thanks to the popularity of Jazba Junoon by Junoon. Like the most popular sports anthems, the song wasn’t expressly written as such but quickly became synonymous with the cricket team. And while the tournament ended ignominiously for Pakistan, the song’s association with the team continued to persist and it is still played in cricket stadiums. The song’s major drawback was that while its lyrics were highly appropriate, they were still lyrics which a cricket crowd couldn’t be expected to fully remember.

For the next World Cup in 1999, Pepsi leveraged its considerable sponsorship of both music and cricket to release the iconic anthem, Tu Hai Kahan. Before that song’s title would be appropriated by the band Aur, it was a go-to for 90s kids as it featured several of the era’s biggest stars coming together in a celebration of the most popular pastime. But it could be argued that the song’s true legacy lay outside cricket - a few years later it was one of the songs bands were asked to cover in the iconic first season of Pepsi Battle of the Bands, and the various musical interpretations took the song far beyond just a sports anthem.

The 2003 World Cup saw the release of what I believe was the last successful anthem made for the national cricket team. Strings’ Hai Koi Hum Jaisa has a slightly problematic video and a pretty anodyne vibe, but the presence of a non-verbal chorus has meant that it has always worked well in stadiums. The “way-oh way-oh way-oh-ah, aalay-aalay-aalay-oh” bit is the part that is always replayed most often in a stadium and the part that’s easiest to sing along to. It remains an essential fixture of the stadium DJ’s playlist, over two decades after its initial release.

This was not the last song made as a cricket anthem in Pakistan, but for a very long time it was the most meaningful one. The major reason for that was the 2009 terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, which led to essentially a decade of no international cricket being played in Pakistan. Without stadiums being used, stadium anthems didn’t leave much of a mark either. One song in particular which might have done better in another era was Noori’s anthem for the T20 World Cup. With their high energy, pop-rock melodies and their lyrics of earnest optimism, Noori were musically quite perfect for this genre, but the timing didn’t work. My personal favourite cricket song of this, or any other era, was the phenomenal Bhoom Bhoom World Cup in 2011, which I wrote about on my blog at length.

Instead, one of the most popular cricket anthems for this era was entirely inadvertent. A few months after the attack on the Sri Lankan team, Pakistan’s men side had a miraculous Cornered Tiger run in the T20 World Cup which they went on to win. The tournament was broadcast on the local Geo Super channel, which regularly played its own ditty - “Geo toa aisay” - during innings breaks and after victories. With Pakistan going onto win the tournament, the song took on a life of its own and was repeatedly played during celebrations of the win.

But the national team’s constant inconsistencies and the lack of home cricket certainly slowed down the spate of cricket-themed music for a few years, until the PSL (Pakistan Super League) came around. The domestic T20 tournament, with six privately owned franchises, was a landmark event on traditional and social media, and it brought back the culture of cricket anthems in a huge way.