Pakistan Cricket is currently at a crossroads— a place it finds itself in approximately every four to six months. In this dire situation, I bring to you a minuscule, minute, miniature distraction from the doom we’re headed towards: the problem of problematic masculinity in our cricketing culture. For most, this is probably not even among the top 10 things wrong with our cricket team and overall culture. At this point of course, when we are still licking our wounds from an all-timer humiliating group stage exit from the World Cup, we simply have much, much bigger fish to fry. However, as far as distractions go, I reckon we might take anything over the reminder of failing to chase 119 with 3 wickets remaining.
If you are someone who thinks a lot about this subject, then kudos because you are not alone. For the rest of the countries in the relatively small list of cricketing nations, cricket is mostly just a sport, a pastime activity to consume at leisure. For Pakistan, however, it’s the high point of an otherwise neglected and impoverished sports industry, mass entertainment in a place with very little else to unite us, occasionally our honor and pride, certainly our chronic lament, and in an off-chance, possibly even an avenue to discover our next prime minister.
Where a regular—some may even say normal—fan of the sport might think oh bat ball and boundary cool, Pakistani fans think, bat ball and boundary representing our grit, our courage, our perseverance, our culture, our zarkhez matti. No matter the format, and thanks to years of being branded as mercurial, no matter the team, each win and loss here is treated with scrutiny worse than you would find the Kardashians going through at the hands of their reality TV audience. The women’s team is exempt from this passion; the mens team players, willingly or unwillingly, become the bearers of a lot of national expectations.
The current generation of players are mostly young men who met their teammates as boys and grew up to be adults playing and touring together. They defied the dominant culture by dismissing previously set benchmarks and aspirations of how national players ought to behave. My earliest memory of this comes from what transpired into the iconic Hassan Ali and Shadab Khan friendship. They were the poster boys of dosti yaari — Twitter critics’ favorite phrase to dismiss anything from verbal support to affectionate interactions among the players. Hassan and Shadab were seen doing everything from hanging out and bickering to being publicly affectionate and supportive of each other.
This is what a majority of the players learned during the first few years as part of the team, and this is what they continue to practice. A lot of folks give this credit to former all-format captain Sarfaraz Ahmad, while some say Babar Azam was the one who cultivated and promoted this kind of unconditional backing. While either or both may be responsible for this brand of team solidarity, the current problem arises outside of its internal implications.
There are two aspects to it: (i) what was initially a rare sighting of positive masculinity developed into quite an uncomfortable case of toxic positivity, (ii) and the fans who were initially smitten by these visible gestures of loyalty and support started turning on the players on account of their poor sporting performances.
Among the players, there is currently a very specific notion of supporting each other, which is sans much reflection and recourse. For every fixture, whether it’s in a bilateral or in a tournament, the post-match conference sounds the same: we will learn from our mistakes and work on our weaknesses - without any real corrective action taking place. The less-than-professional journalists then add fuel to that fire by spreading half-rumors, at times even leaking internal dressing room gossip. All of this is made worse by festering tensions that naturally came to be after Babar Azams resignation from the captains position and eventual reappointment following the subsequent side-lining of Shaheen Shah Afridi.
The current team is mostly made up of players coming out of the Pakistan Super League. The young fans who giddily sat in front of the television for Pakistan’s first franchise league grew up, and the young stars who came out of that league and made the national team, grew up with them. That relationship involves a great deal of defensive projection around issues of masculinity, particularly the standards to which these players should conduct themselves as men. Essentially, these young male fans expect their cricket idols to conform to very traditional notions of masculinity by embodying aggression, unrelenting rationality, and refraining from vulnerability/emotions. When players publicly behave in contravention of these standards, they become the target of abuse.
An offshoot of this is a generalized decrying of female fans as shallow, and an assumption that they are not smart or knowledgeable enough about cricket to comment on it. Typically branded as post-Covid fans, there is certainly an ongoing phenomenon of being spectators of the star rather than the sport. But this is not always as big a liability as the misogynistic male gatekeepers online would have everyone believe, especially for a board with a flair for the dramatic as big and bold as the spectators’. While there is certainly something to consider regarding the parasocial nature of these relationships, it is hardly a matter worthy of repeated discussion and criticism after every abject failure of the team.
Because our relationship to cricket is so deeply tied to the country’s identity and politics, discourse on cricket is usually couched in religiosity and nationalism. With modern celebrity-fan relationships added to this mix, it makes for disastrous overall consequences: a near-constant stream of critical scrutiny over the players’ bodies, mannerisms, interpersonal relationships, and all else.
This fan attitude to the players also spills over to the Pakistani cricket fandom: female fans are often subjected to verbal abuse, veiled threats, harassment and in some cases, even doxxing. The best-case scenario as a female cricket fan is merely being discredited for your opinions. While online fandom can be a place of wildly unexpected kinships and bonds, it can also nurture cult-like tendencies to forego critical thinking. The largely unreported microaggressions Pakistani women in these spaces have to contend with are certainly an example of that.
In a way, this discussion is a throwback to the heyday of the current Pakistan cricket team, when their influence on the culture was what comprised the majority of the discourse around them. Now it seems like a by-gone utopia in comparison to whatever regressed state the team and board currently sit at.
Did the distraction succeed at its attempt to divert us from the certain doom that is now upon us? No. We are still at the fifth management change for the board within a couple of years, countless unsuccessful tournament campaigns deep and it still does look bleak because after all, what do concepts such as accountability and introspection mean to us? And if you, like me, are on the lookout for faint glimmers of a silver lining due to your decades-long attachment to the game, all the goofy and loving interactions are now rendered increasingly hollow, thanks to the boys and the management not even trying to make it look like they are trying to win something. We need to find our way back to chaotic-good, out from the mess of hopeless evil that surrounds us. Back to the unrelenting grit that made possible the impossible in many cases for us, for the boys to go back to playing and propping each other up, hand to heart, shoulder to shoulder.
Fizza Ghanchi is a writer-in-progress from Karachi, Pakistan, curious about evaluating the overlapping complexities of gender and class. Their work has been a part of Reimagining Relations and Alfaaz Zine. Otherwise found reading or getting emotionally annihilated by their cricket team.
