The more punctilious among you may have noticed that this week's Spin is running late by the small matter of, oh, two days or so. Apologies. Last Sunday slipping away from the England team to head off to Sri Lanka seemed such a simple idea. Four flights, three airports, a round-trip road run from Colombo to Kandy and 2,041 miles later it seems safe to say I was being a little naïve. Never mind. I am now safely ensconced in Nagpur, a city getting into the swing of things ahead of the big match between India and South Africa this Saturday, and have a little time to look back on the last 48 hours.
In Sri Lanka I was hoping to write a paean to Pakistan. Having seen Shahid Afridi bowl them to victory in their first three matches it seemed to me that there may just have been a suggestion of a similarity between this team and the side that won the World Cup in 1992, in that they had drawn strength from the adversity they found themselves in. With Imran Khan's side it was just that they endured a terrible start to the tournament. Afridi's team, it hardly need to be said, have been through far worse things in the last six months. And yet here they were winning all their matches, with all the old enmities apparently put to one side.
Younus Khan, whose captaincy was so divisive that it led eight players to take an oath of allegiance not to play under him, is back from exile. As is Misbah-ul-Haq, who threatened to quit international cricket last July because he was so fed up with being ignored by the selectors. And then there was Shoaib Akhtar, still one of the most entertaining men in the game, even if he is a little thicker around and the middle and thinner on top than he once was. In my head I saw a line about their being a little of the spirit of Imran's cornered tigers about the team, but then I'm a bit of a sucker for lore like that. Turned out that caged pandas would have been closer to it.
Or in Kamran Akmal's case, a performing seal, clapping his hands at the ball as though he expected Afridi to toss him a fish if he happened to cling on to it. Cruel as it may be to say, his incompetence behind the stumps is staggering. In four games in this World Cup so far he has dropped two catches, refused to try for a third and squandered two stumpings. The wicketkeeper is the heart of any cricket team in the field, and Pakistan need a transplant. When Ross Taylor edged his third ball between 'keeper and slip, Kamran looked imploringly at the man stood alongside him, Younus, who simply turned his back and stared in the other direction. So much for team spirit.
When Shoaib bunged four overthrows over Akmal's head after fielding a forward defensive off his own bowling, he stood with one hand on his cocked hip and looking around the field. No one came near him. The cricket pitch has rarely seemed such a lonely place.
The post-match press conference with Waqar Younis turned into a roast at Kamran's expense. "Waqar!" shouted one member of the Pakistani press, "can you tell me, what is the difference between Kamran Akmal and Michael Jackson?" "You don't have to answer that," cut in the man from the ICC, but Waqar chuckled, happy to play along. "The difference is that Michael Jackson is dead," he said. Sadly, in all the ensuing laughter I didn't catch the proper punchline, but any suggestions as to what it could have been would be welcome.
Ross Taylor said that he probably ought to buy Kamran dinner to say thank you for giving him such a generous present on his 27th birthday. The clamour about Kamran's failings overwhelmed the shocking display of Shoaib, who seemed to be in a strop from his first ball through to his last, scuffing the turf like a kid kicking a tin can as he tried, and failed, to find the right mark to run in from. He and Abdul Razzaq, with 421 ODIs between them, bowled like beginners. Within an hour of their implosion, they would get a free demonstration of how to go about bowling on that pitch in those conditions from Tim Southee and Kyle Mills, almost unplayable in their opening overs.
Taylor's innings provoked school-boyish excitement in the press box, his sixes drawing whistles of disbelief and coos of admiration from the assembled hacks. But as the crowd roared him off the pitch, and Afridi patted him on the back in recognition of his innings, ugly words were swirling around the internet. As I read them, the elation I felt after watching such an entertaining innings vanished and my stomach turned as I realised that in England at least, Pakistan's defeat would be pregnant with unwanted implications.
After the events of last summer, some English fans and journalists are now unable to take Pakistan's performance at face value. This, as I wrote in the match report, is the burden the team now have to carry. Even though their play was no more bizarre or error-prone than, for example, England's against Ireland. "Pakistan get treated differently" say some, "and with good reason," reply others.
This is not an easy to topic to tackle, but it is also undeniably a backdrop of this tournament. These are fertile times for suspicious minds across the cricket-playing community. Last week it was Australia who were reportedly being investigated for spot-fixing, a suggestion they laughed off. Mahela Jayawardene and Thilan Samaraweera were also publicly accused of helping to throw the match against Pakistan. Then there were suggestions about the tie between India and England, based solely on the fact that Shane Warne had predicted the result beforehand. That was on Twitter, a medium that the 24-hour news organisations are hardwired in to but where innuendo comes cheap and libel tends to go unpunished.
There is no solution. Ideally we would trust the ICC's Anti-Corruption and Security Unit to do all the worrying for us, but critics would point out that it took the News of the World to do their work for them last summer. At the same time the media has a responsibility to deal in proof rather than rumour, something some outlets have conspicuously failed to do.
If you look for strange patterns you will find them in everywhere, that's what makes 50-over cricket such an entertaining game. Whether or not you then decide they are suspicious or not is a matter of your mindset. It is simply a question of whether you choose to suspend your disbelief or not. But if the answer is no, why watch sport in the first place? And that is why I wanted to see Pakistan win when I came to Pallekele, and want them to go on winning as the Cup goes on. It is the only way cricket can quieten the cynical voices.
