Australia’s 1988 tour of Pakistan left fretful Stephen Rodger Waugh with plenty to lament. The first item of consideration was his paltry batting return – 92 runs in five innings – which had the young all-rounder emotionally confiding in team-mate Graeme Wood that he felt doomed never to make a Test hundred.
Then there was umpire Mahboob Shah’s questionable lbw decision against him in the first Test at Karachi, which sparked a diplomatic incident when tour manager Col Egar stormed into the officials’ room to remonstrate about the state of the pitch and umpiring, and then, with coach Bob Simpson by his side, called a clandestine press conference of touring Australian journalists and threatened total abandonment of the series.
Yet in assessing the wreckage of Australia’s disastrous tour almost 20 years later, Waugh, by then the spearhead of the rising cult of the baggy green, seemed more annoyed than anything by an insult inflicted on the game itself by Pakistan’s captain and controversialist in chief Javed Miandad. In being granted seven chances on his way to 211, Miandad had the temerity to defy Australia’s baggy greened best while wearing a white trucker hat emblazoned with Milton Glaser’s famous “I heart NY” logo.
As Pakistan currently move through their 17th tour of Australia – disappointingly brief compared to their sprawling engagements of the 1970s and 80s – we’ll be reminded again of the fascinating juxtaposition of these two geographically and philosophically distant nations, for whom cricket alone has served as an object of mutual fascination.
Of course Steve Waugh ended up a worldlier and more inquisitive man than most cricketers of his generation, but in griping over Miandad’s indifference to tradition and convention, he illustrated the dominant Australian attitude towards Pakistan since the nations first met in the international arena: if you want to know the right way of doing Test cricket, look at Pakistan and do the opposite.
For all its celebration of larrikinism and lore, Australian cricket has for most of its history tended towards conformism and eyed suspiciously the improvisations and oddities of nations like Pakistan. Diplomat and sage he might have been, even Richie Benaud was not averse to mild condescension, telling anybody who’d listen on Australia’s first proper tour of the fledgling nation in 1959 (they’d previously played and lost one attritional Test there – Keith Miller’s last – on the way home from the 1956 Ashes) that their matting wickets needed to be banished forever.
Statesmanlike Benaud had actually requested government briefing before the ‘59 trip so as not to offend his hosts or cause any kind of diplomatic ructions, but the cricketer in him became so paranoid about Pakistani playing surfaces that all pre-tour training was conducted on matting wickets. According to an anecdote in Wounded Tiger, Peter Oborne’s comprehensive and fascinating history of Pakistan cricket, Benaud made one of his men sleep at the ground on the eve of each day of the three Tests, lest any pitch-tampering occur.
The consequences of Benaud’s stubborn campaign were literally game-changing for Pakistan cricket. The newly-installed martial law ruler Ayub Khan, who had entertained US president Dwight Eisenhower on the punishingly dull fourth day of the final Test at Karachi, bowed to the Australian captain’s personal lobbying after play and issued an order for turf wickets to be installed at every first class ground in the country.
Throughout the combined cricket history of these two countries there is a common thread of Australia imposing their own will and ways on the opposition, sometimes with success but often with unintended consequences. Imran Khan noted that Pakistan’s 1972-73 tour of Australia was an awakening for a generation of his countrymen. “I distinctly remember the aggression that was learnt by our players from the tour,” Imran wrote in 1990.
“Indeed, Sarfraz [Nawaz] picked up sledging from the Australians… I felt that the Pakistan team actually became truly battle-hardened after that trip and I feel it was a watershed for our cricket.” So too, we now know, was what happened on Australian shores during the 1992 World Cup, Imran and Pakistan cricket’s finest hour. Australia bowed out of that one with scarcely a whimper.
Looking back, Karachi ‘88 should be central to our understanding of the “Australian way” of playing Test cricket on the subcontinent and also its relationship with Pakistan, for it highlights the lineage of arrogance, inflexibility and pigheadedness that has blighted the country’s efforts to win Tests on foreign soil, and the hollowness of the recriminations when they don’t.
Border’s men entered that 1988 tour full of now-familiar promises; their captain said they’d accept umpiring decisions come what may and his side adopted as its credo the philosophy captured in a photograph by their countryman Jim Higgs on the wall of a Madras fisherman’s tenement during the the 1979 tour of India: “To lose patience is to lose the battle”. Yet by the loss of their fifth wicket in their first Test innings of the tour – the contentious, aforementioned dismissal of Waugh – they’d dropped their bundle in unprecedented style.
With the exception of India, Pakistan is the cricket nation that most exposes Australia’s longstanding moral hypocrisies. Australians apt to dredge up the match-fixing scandals involving the likes of Saleem Malik and 2016 tourist Mohammad Amir tend to be forgetful on the matter of “John the Bookie”. We jeered as one at the doping violations of Shoaib Akhtar, fast bowling contemporary of clean-cut Brett Lee, but Shane Warne’s one-year ban was sheeted home to his mother.
Australians given to stereotyping Pakistan cricket as chaotic, schismatic and shonky push to one side Australia’s 17-man Test squads and pick-em-all-and-see approach to limited over selection. We also disregard that in instances such as that shambolic ‘88 tour, questionable umpiring didn’t hold Australia back quite as much as two dozen dropped catches and almost total batting ineptitude. The last time these two teams met in Tests, we looked the other way as Australia batted Glenn Maxwell at three.
Oddities sinister and benign abound in this quirky shared history. Abdul Qadir was unknowable and exotic to 1980s Australia, but a decade later toiled almost anonymously in Melbourne club ranks, against players who grew up idolising Border and using bats made in Pakistan. Wasim Akram married an Australian. Waqar Younis moved here. And yet, decades after the term had been widely acknowledged as a racial epithet you will still hear Australians thoughtlessly referring to the tourists as “the Pakis”. This terminology was used in Australian advertising campaigns of the 1980s and questionable crowd banners of the early 90s (“Kick a Paki” read one, depicting Mianded being booted skyward by Dennis Lillee)..
Perhaps it is not surprising but the only genuinely high-profile Pakistani-Australian is Usman Khawaja, whose rise is remarkable in that a quiet-achieving Muslim man should captain the Sheffield Shield cricket team in the parochial, politically conservative state that gave us Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter.
Khawaja will be batting at number three for Australia later this afternoon, by which time somebody has hopefully briefed the ground’s security personnel thoroughly. On Tuesday, while preparing for the first Test, Khawaja was directed by a member of his home venues’ ground staff to the tourists’ dressing rooms.
In all this, one might surmise that a dominant character trait of Australians is their stubborn and Anglo-centric refusal to embrace what is different. That puts us at odds with a nation like Pakistan, whose complicated nationhood and restless, remarkable cricketing spirit could never be condensed into something so dry as a John Williamson ballad.
Australia’s worn-out sporting touchstones – Bradman, Phar Lap and the spirit of the Anzacs – are easily and artlessly mined by our cultural racketeers. In contrast, the essence of Pakistani cricket is found in the likes of Hanif Mohammad, who scored defiant, drawn-out centuries that even ardent fans would have deemed pointless, or the ageless and esoteric Shahid Afridi, whose malleable date of birth is as fascinating to most Australian fans as his playing statistics, and who makes you wonder whether pointlessness isn’t actually cricket’s greatest virtue.
This summer, those Australians who remember Mohammad Amir as the 17-year-old fast bowling wunderkind who casually sliced through the local batsmen in the Boxing Day Test of 2009 will thrill again at his slender and supple frame making something remarkable look effortless, thus upholding the swing bowling tradition of Wasim – that rare Pakistani cricketer who Australians loved unconditionally.
Australia have won 28 Test encounters between these sides, Pakistan 14, with 17 drawn. To win this time around Pakistan will defy history; they’ve lost 21 of their 32 Tests in Australia, winning only four. Yet as we approach the end of this year of worldwide tumult, what would be more perversely appropriate than Pakistan routing Australia on its own turf?
If it happens, it will mean that preternaturally gifted Amir has silently thundered to some new height, and probably that batting mystic Younis Khan has negotiated every pink ball, red ball and throat ball hurled at him, all while their stoic captain Misbah ul-Haq joins Imran in eternal glory. And best of all, Australians will be able to ascribe this tilting of the earth’s axis to something supernatural, a force beyond our ken. We just won’t be able to blame the pitches.
