Hassan Cheema
What's wrong with being a bully at home?
Asian batsmen only get recognition when they do well in the "foreign" conditions of Australia, England, South Africa and New Zealand. The reverse rarely applies
Hassan Cheema
19-Jan-2014
At a recent wedding in Lahore, the talk turned to cricket - because there are only a handful of subjects that Pakistanis of a certain age, class and gender can discuss at a formal gathering, and cricket tops that list (society, or rather the messed-up state of the nation as shown by anecdotal evidence, is a clear runner-up in such a list).
The subject at hand was Sharjeel Khan, who had made his international debut in December. The almost unanimous verdict was that Sharjeel just wasn't good enough for international cricket, as his technique wasn't up to scratch. Later, watching him in an ODI against Sri Lanka, I wondered whether that accepted verdict, which I fully endorsed, was unkind to him. So what if he didn't seem technically adept and would eventually be "found out"? Why does that matter? With Pakistan playing nearly all of their bilateral cricket over the next three years in familiar environs, wouldn't they be better off with a flat-track bully than waiting around for a technically perfect player who may not exist?
It is a point of view that anyone who has encountered the Asian fan (particularly on Twitter) will be aware of: the Asian player, particularly a batsman, is not any good until he scores runs in Australia, New Zealand, England or South Africa. Why the Asian player has to go beyond the call of duty to be appreciated is a little confusing.
Full postBowlers are back in the game
After the runaway batting averages and homogeneous pitches of the 2000s, it appears we may be seeing a welcome correction
Hassan Cheema
04-Jan-2014
Test cricket in 2013 ended with South Africa on top, as India's young batsmen failed to negotiate the challenge of Steyn and Co. The result, a home win, was also a send-off for one of the greatest batsmen of all time. Considering what had happened in the previous 12 months, it felt appropriate.
It was the year when the defenders of Test cricket once again complained of strawmen signalling the death of the format, and all of us felt uneasy about the India-Australia ODI series, which danced on the line between spectacle and farce. Yet it was also a year that gave hope for Test cricket and its competitiveness. Sure, South Africa are further away from the rest of the field than they were 12 months ago, but the duel between bat and ball seems to be a contest once again. In terms of batting average the year ranked 35th in the last 50 years, the worst for batsmen since 2000.
It was the continuation of a positive trend that has been relatively underappreciated. Two-thousand and eleven ranks 31st on that table, and 2012 is at No. 18. Considering the decade that just went by, this is the best news that aficionados of the long form could have hoped for. The noughties, after all, were the decade of the batsman. Seven of the eight years from 2003 to 2010 rank in the top 15 of that table - never in modern cricket had the contest been so skewed. But the balance seems to have been redressed. In six of the eight years from 2003 to 2010 the run rate was 3.30 or higher (the exceptions being 2003, with 3.20, and 2008 with 3.23), in each of the last three years it has been under 3.15.
Full postPakistan's Streltsov question
Can Asif and Amir be compared to the Russian wunderkind who returned to professional football after a seven-year gap?
Hassan Cheema
22-Dec-2013
Last week's Mohammad Asif interview to Mazher Arshad came on the heels of English footballer DJ Campbell being arrested in connection with a spot-fixing investigation - another instance of sport's lost battle against corruption, although in this case there were no calls for all English or London-born footballers to be banned for life.
In the interview Asif talked about looking forward to making a comeback, making amends for his lost years, almost to the point of being unrepentant. This is an attitude that has been prevalent in all the public proclamations that the Damned Trio - Asif, Salman Butt and Mohammad Amir - have made since being sentenced by a London court. There is a belief that once their bans end, they will return to their previous roles and restart their careers after a pause of five years.
In the interview Asif came across as the gifted peacock he has always been. It is this aspect that allows him to think that he can walk back into the national team in his mid-30s and be better than the current and next generation of Pakistani pacers. But will he be able to walk back? Should he, or the other two, be able to?
Full postAmla's Irfan problem
The South African has been one of the best one-day batsmen in the last five years, but now a tall left-armer is making a dent in his impressive stats
Hassan Cheema
26-Nov-2013
I have always felt that rather than trying to rank cricketers individually, it's better to separate the contents of a generation by tiers. Over the five-year period from 2008 to 2012, there was a very clear top tier in ODI cricket. Only five batsmen averaged over 50 during this time (Amla, de Villiers, Kohli, Chanderpaul and Dhoni). While basketball has the 50-40-90 club to identify its greatest shooters, modern ODI cricket could have had the 50-90 club, which only contained Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers, who are up there statistically during this period.
But both of them have regressed this year. De Villiers has had a reasonable year, although he "only" averages 45. For Amla, the decline has been starker - his average in 2013 is nearly half of what it was pre-2013. On the surface the reasons for the decline seem obvious. A majority of South Africa's games this year have been against Sri Lanka and Pakistan - two of the better bowling attacks in the world, and two teams that still have quality spin attacks, which South African batsmen have historically struggled against.
Except that isn't really the story. De Villiers was the Player of the Series against Pakistan earlier this year in both the Test and the ODI series, and he played Saeed Ajmal better than anyone not named Kumar Sangakkara. Amla, meanwhile, has generally played the Pakistan spinners well, and missed most of the Sri Lanka series after scoring well in the first two games.
Full postWhere are Pakistan's daddy hundreds?
Gone are the days of Miandad and Zaheer Abbas. Now a kid coming in aims to make a fifty; a hundred seems beyond expectations
Hassan Cheema
29-Oct-2013
Twenty months after Pakistan laid an Emirati smackdown on the No. 1 Test team in the world, they couldn't repeat the trick. South Africa came back and made their presence felt, much like Faf du Plessis' zipper. Praise was reserved, deservedly, for the South African bowling attack - described by Allan Donald as the greatest in the country's history - and how they pretty much wrapped everything up on day one of the second Test. Yet the situation wasn't dissimilar to the one Pakistan faced in the third Test of the England series (as almost everyone tweeted; in fact, it was the most the number 99 had been discussed since the long winter Sachin Tendulkar spent chasing his 100th hundred), but South Africa held the pillow firm until Pakistan stopped twitching. Thus it was the second day more than the first that showed the difference between the last two teams that have come to the UAE as world No. 1.
Much was, quite rightly, made of how Andy Flower turned England into a team that scored big hundreds. England have scored more double-hundreds since 2007 than they did between 1992* and 2007**. It is a lesson that South Africa have also taken on board, and they have done even better than England. No team has scored more 150-plus scores (31) than South Africa in the last six years, though each of the Big Three (Australia, India and England) has played at least five more Tests. This is what was on show during the second day of the Test in Dubai: Graeme Smith and AB de Villiers refused to get out, and when they did show some inclination to do so, Pakistan refused to oblige, Akmaling it up in customary fashion.
The two big hundreds by de Villiers and Smith also showed how South Africa have improved as a batting team in the last six years. In their first 15 years after readmission they scored 0.9 hundreds per Test match and their conversion from fifties was less than 30%. Now they score more hundreds than anyone else (they average 1.49 hundreds every Test during the last six years; India and Sri Lanka are the next best, at 1.2) and manage to convert them into big scores, despite their most prolific century-maker (Jacques Kallis) not being fond of them. (Not that they mind, considering only Alastair Cook and Kumar Sangakkara have scored more hundreds than Kallis since 2007.) In terms of their fifties-to-hundreds ratio they are far ahead of every other team in the world (85 hundreds to go with 114 fifties in these six years). It owes to a generation of batsmen who are - statistically, if not in terms of adulation - equal to the Australian and Indian batting line-ups of the last decade or so, particularly in their ability to seize the moment. And much like with England, their most successful coach (Gary Kirsten) was renowned for his own ability to convert fifties into tons and make those tons exceptionally big.
Full postThe fan's torment
Cricket offers supporters plenty of time to think, and to swing from extreme pessimism to false hope and back again
Hassan Cheema
23-Oct-2013
On Saturday, Liverpool, joint top of the English Premier League at the time, drew with Newcastle United. I logged onto Twitter midway through the second half and decided to go through tweets from the previous hour. It was, as the cliché goes, a fascinating rollercoaster of emotions from the Liverpool fans.
It started with uber-optimistic thoughts from a fan base that found their team top of the table when they weren't expecting it, but a single goal turned them into martyrs. The masochism that comes with following all but the best seven or eight teams in Europe was out in full flow. This is not a slight on Liverpool fans, even though it may look like it; it's the portrait of what a sports fan goes through when following his team. Twitter thus can become a record, a collection of minutes if you will, of the thought processes of the fans emotionally involved in the match at hand.
Last week Pakistan beat South Africa in a Test for the first time in six years. It was a supremely professional and competent performance - not unlike their previous outings in the UAE since 2010. Pakistan took control in the first session and never let up. It was almost Australian in how they never relinquished the initiative. Every South African comeback attempt was thwarted as if it was part of a whack-a-mole game.
Full postPakistan: trying to run before they can crawl
The lack of top-flight cricket at home is beginning to tell on Pakistan's players
Hassan Cheema
13-Oct-2013
With Pakistan hosting South Africa in the UAE, much has been made of the selection policy that has led up to this series. On one hand are the complaints that despite a disastrous 2013 there has been little in the way of changes to the national squad. On the other are moans about the lack of quality in the upcoming crop. And lastly there are objections that the two best young batsmen (Umar Akmal and Fawad Alam) failed to even make the A team, let alone the main squad. (This last group of complaints is mostly restricted to the world of social media, which is the only place where these two batsmen are considered Test quality.) And this is all before considering the views of the group that believes that Misbah-ul-Haq is the devil.
This summer Pakistan also failed to qualify for a major hockey tournament for the first time. With similar sob stories in other minor sports, one could argue that this is the worst shape Pakistan sport has ever been in. An objective, overarching look might conclude that the professionalisation of most sports worldwide over the last quarter century or so has left Pakistan behind - a country that always relied on natural talent more than planning, and was proud of doing so.
A greater impact has been from the lack of international sport on the country's teams. Whenever the lack of international cricket in Pakistan is discussed, the financial aspect of it is deliberated, and so is the issue of the public missing out. Often we miss the most obvious point - the talent development and identification. If Level 1 (in a table that I just made up) is a player playing at home in the domestic first-class game, Level 2 is him playing against an international team in those conditions, Level 3 would be him playing Test cricket at home, and Level 4 would be him playing away. Right now Pakistani cricketers, especially batsmen, struggle because they jump straight from Level 1 to 4.
Full postThe Trott problem
He has fallen off his early peak, perhaps inevitably, but it might have to do with having to play in a manner that does not come naturally to him
Hassan Cheema
28-Aug-2013
The recently concluded Ashes series brought forth a confusing version of Jonathan Trott. The England No. 3 has historically been portrayed as the embodiment of the soul-sapping grind-till-they-quit style of Andy Flower's England team. Yet apart from the first innings of the fifth Test Trott played precisely the sort of stuff that Flower would not approve of - flighty forties and fifties before inexplicably getting out.
This inability to convert is not new. Trott has had a decline even as the popular perception of him hasn't altered. Over the first 18 months of his career, leading up to and including the Ashes in 2010-11, he averaged over 61 in Test cricket; but, like Mike Hussey a few years before him, the gods of cricket averages caught up to him and dragged him back towards more mortal numbers. In fact, since that series Trott has averaged a mere 40 in the longest format.
How much is a man averaging 40 worth to a team gunning to be the best in the world? A sample size of 30 Tests (over 27-odd months) is not small enough to be considered an aberration. Do you prefer someone who averages 40 but has the capability to bat for nearly seven hours in the final four sessions in India, against Indian spinners (as Trott did in Nagpur) to win you a historic series? Or do you prefer someone who averages 45 over a long period but on the basis of scores against weak bowling attacks on easy pitches, or as the supporting act in an innings (pointing fingers at no one in particular - especially after the Ashes just finished). How do you statistically measure someone's ability to win or draw you a game singlehandedly?
Full postWho is to blame for Pakistan's lack of Test fixtures?
Pointing fingers at the boards of India, England and Australia is useless. Administrators of the smaller nations are the ones who okay lop-sided scheduling
Hassan Cheema
05-Aug-2013
Across the ocean from the all-consuming Ashes, Pakistan and West Indies played in a rather unique venture - a bilateral ODI series that proved entertaining. Of course, like all recent Pakistani encounters it had its dollops of mediocrity and mind-numbing nothingness; but it did provide evidence of why entertaining sport is usually provided either by sustained excellence or performing equivalence.
But Pakistani eyes are also focused on England, where a big enough series win for the home side would propel Pakistan above Australia to fourth in the ICC Test rankings. The rankings take into account performances in the previous four years, with the latter two counting for more - and while Pakistan only have the fifth-best win-loss ratio over the last four years, they are second only to South Africa in the last two. Of course, fourth place is nothing to be celebrated, despite all evidence to contrary provided in English football every May, but it does provide something for Pakistan to hold on to. The reason for that is the 2017 World Test Championship - where, however, the presence of Pakistan may not be economically beneficial to the cabal of three.
Thus Pakistan have something to defend, except they have nowhere to defend it. Pakistan's prize for clean-sweeping the No. 1 team in the world was a grand total of three Tests over the following 12 months (and three more in next six). It is a state of affairs that several members of the Pakistani team object to. In their words, the last thing a team in form, especially one with most of its players in the latter halves of their career, needs is a sustained period, or two, of inactivity.
Full postAustralia are now Pakistan
They have the hopeless batting order, the talented but mentorless quicks, the perpetually disappointing allrounder and the much criticised system to show
Hassan Cheema
28-Jul-2013
A generation of Pakistanis grew up fearing Australia. There was little admiration or ability to relate, just fear. Even more than Hansie Cronje's South Africa, it was Steve Waugh's team who became tormentors of Pakistan's great champions. At Lord's in 1999 they killed the idealism of a generation. Six months later, in Hobart, they prepared coffins for the most talented group of Pakistani cricketers there ever will be. These Australian teams saw the holes in Pakistan's armour and bluster and drove a spear through them.
Pakistan failed to win a Test match against Australia for 15 years. Pakistan went to face an average Australian team in 2009-10 and came back winless. Pakistani players continued to call the Australians their role models, and continued to talk about them in revered tones even after the Aussies became vincible.
Imran Khan, the purveyor of all that is true, spent two decades telling us how everything in our system was wrong, and how the Australian way was perfect. For Pakistani fans, these Australians were an alien race brought to this world to torment our heroes while providing a different, more successful (if not aesthetically better) way of doing things. People you could follow and fear.
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