Matches (14)

IPL (2)

ENG v PAK (W) (1)

County DIV1 (5)

County DIV2 (4)

Charlotte Edwards (1)

T20I Tri-Series (1)

RESULT • 67th Match • IPL • T20 • Wankhede

LSG

214/6

(20 ov, T:215) 196/6

LSG won by 18 runs

Schedule Table Report Series

RESULT • 2nd T20I • Northampton

ENG-W

144/6

PAK-W

(15.5/20 ov, T:145) 79

ENG Women won by 65 runs

Schedule Report Series

Ahmer Naqvi

It's not Fawad's fight

We tend to be too eager to saddle sportspeople with the burden of being catalysts for social change

Ahmer Naqvi

11-Sep-2013

In 2011, when the world was swept up in the fervour of the Arab Spring(s), and before these had descended into genocides and counter-coups, there was a prevalent opinion in the western media that the advent of Facebook and Twitter had been the game-changers responsible for catalysing revolutions against dictators who had ruled for decades.

However, the prescient Malcolm Gladwell argued otherwise - he wrote that revolutions occurred before the internet, and the crucial factor in a revolution was the presence of a committed core of activists. Gladwell (and others) said that social media sites were still just tools for communication, rather than catalysts of revolution.

This mistaking of consequence with cause was brought to my mind while thinking about the backlash over Fawad Ahmed not wearing a beer sponsor's logo on his Australian uniform. Having had laws changed and procedures upended so his entry into the team could be fast-tracked, his mere decision to exercise an option provided in his contract led men like Dougie Walters and David Campese to suggest that Fawad "go home".

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The idea of Afridi

His larger-than-life aura is fittingly captured by a melodramatic, entertaining new masala movie that takes what he means to Pakistan to its logical conclusion

Ahmer Naqvi

05-Sep-2013

"If you wanna hear the crowd [x2]
Screaming out your name so loud
If you wanna hear the crowd
Say...
Boom boom - Afridi"
- "Boom Boom Afridi", The Duckworth Lewis Method

It's poetic how in an age where televised cricket, and its attendant haste and excess, has become the core of how the game is viewed and played, the fastest century ever made in international cricket, the most TV-friendly innings of all time, doesn't have an iconic image associated with it, existing only in the mind, as some sort of platonic ideal of modern, consumer-friendly cricket.

It was the first time that the player in question had batted, but since then, each of the 441 times SMS Khan Afridi has walked out to bat in international cricket, all of us, and most of all him, have tried to relive that gloriously improbable memory.

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The sound of Shoaib

He stirred something deep within us, something born of our basic emotions, something that is part of the essential appeal of all sport

Ahmer Naqvi

13-Aug-2013

Recently the Pakistani journalist Hassan Cheema wrote an expansive, evocative essay on Shoaib Akhtar. The piece was a personal recounting of Hassan's memories of one of the country's greatest enigmas.

Like most sober reflections on Shoaib, this one too was etched with disappointment, and it's not difficult to see why.

For starters, Shaiby played shockingly few Tests, 46, which makes it difficult to statistically justify considering him amongst the capital-G greats. Moreover, only his strike rate of 45.7 places him among Pakistan's top three pace bowlers in Tests - in every other respect he's closer to Sarfraz Nawaz and Umar Gul than to Imran or the two Ws. In fact, when accounting for spinners, his record barely places him in the all-time top ten of Pakistani bowlers.

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Walking tall

Would Mohammad Irfan's remarkable journey have been possible had he not been 7'1"?

Ahmer Naqvi

27-Jul-2013

The first time we went to see a cricket match in England, my wife and I caught a rude surprise. We had shown up at Chester-le-Street wearing our replica shirts, but this was September and the rest of the crowd were bedecked in anoraks to combat the howling winds, and were in possession of a variety of liquids to numb the ensuing pain.

Clearly we weren't equipped for the torture to follow, but we still weren't as unprepared as that day's debutant, Mohammad Irfan, seemed to be. Bowling stiff and wayward, he conceded 37 runs in 5.3 wicketless overs before limping off the field.

Of course, it wasn't meant to turn out this way. Irfan's tale seemed straight out of post-modernist fantasy to some, and this match was meant to be the glorious climax of that story. Here was a cricketer from Pakistan's rural backwaters who had quit the game disillusioned and impoverished. Earning a pittance as a labourer in a pipe factory, he was spotted by members of the influential online cricket forum, Pakpassion.net. They harangued Aaqib Javed about their find until he relented and had a look. Aaqib liked what he saw and Irfan's life turned around dramatically as he was fast-tracked into the national set-up.

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Enough about Misbah already

Pakistan needs to look beyond the captain at the real problems that afflict the team

Ahmer Naqvi

21-Jul-2013

One January morning in Lahore, a well-groomed young man, having walked up Davis Road to the Mall, turned to Charing Cross. His hair was sleek and shining and he wore sideburns. His thin moustache seemed to have been drawn with a pencil. He had on a brown overcoat with a cream coloured half opened rose in his buttonhole and a green felt hat which he wore at a rakish angle. A white silk scarf was knotted at his neck. One of his hands was slipped into a pocket of his overcoat while the other held a short polished cane which every now and then he twirled jauntily. (Excerpt from Ghulam Abbas' short story "Overcoat", translated by CZ Abbas)

One of Pakistan's greatest writers started his most popular story with these lines. I was reminded of his work earlier this week, while watching Pakistan's tour of the West Indies. Those of you who have been following this series are well aware that it is the largest televised event of competitive mediocrity since Simon Cowell's last show.

The question that came to mind while watching Pakistan bat in the first two matches had to do, inevitably, with the captain, Misbah-ul-Haq.

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Pakistan's saviour? Jose Mourinho

Why the confrontational football coach is just right to team up with Misbah and Co

Ahmer Naqvi

05-Jul-2013

In 1947, a few weeks after Pakistan's independence, a group of politicians, army generals, journalists, intellectuals and milkmen (highly revered as fortune tellers in the local culture) met for a long series of meetings on what to do with this newly born country.

Seeing that Pakistan had dozens of ethnicities, who spoke scores of languages, each of which had hundreds of dialects and thousands of curses, it was decided that the country should celebrate its "diversity" from there on in. Unfortunately email facilities in the 1940s weren't quite what they are now, and so somewhere between a garbled accent and a missed keystroke, the press release for this conference announced that Pakistan had decided to revel in its "adversity".

Now, lesser countries would have fallen apart at such a catastrophic typo, but Pakistanis are made of something else entirely. Sixty-five years later we are the Microsoft of global adversity, and everyone seems to be used to it.

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Is Trott the new Batman?

It's not such a stretch to think of England's No. 3 in the role of a certain caped crusader

Ahmer Naqvi

20-Jun-2013

In a century that has given us terrorist crises, long, intractable wars, the near-collapse of the global financial system, and the IPL, it is little wonder that a slew of superhero movies has cropped up as a cultural response of sorts. It makes sense too, since many current superheroes were originally products of the Great Depression and the World Wars.

No recent superhero film has equalled the commercial and critical success of the Dark Knight trilogy, and one thing that set it apart from other contemporary and classical hero movies was its celebration of conservative values. Forbes magazine called it an "instant conservative classic", arguing that the third film was a denouncement of the French Revolution. The Telegraph celebrated that the films showed Batman as "secretly, wonderfully Right-wing", while the Wall Street Journal claimed that The Dark Knight was "a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W Bush in this time of terror and war".

It takes a moment to realise how momentous the popularity of a superhero championing conservative values truly is. Popular culture has often been accused of pushing liberal and allegedly subversive values, so a Batman inspired by Dubya feels quite radical.

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