For today’s cricketers and their managers, lessons from the far pavilion are well worth revisiting

Cricket pictures crowd my makeshift storage closet. As a transient who has changed homes many times, I cart them along in my memory of life. They fade with the fatigue of age. But they retain a certain glint; a certain fidelity that never loses its mystique of men long gone. Their smiling handsome faces continue to peer out of the black and white glossy paper now turned sepia with time.

Many questions rush to mind that I want answered. But all I get in return is silence. These pictures can’t speak. They can’t tell the stories that I must have heard many times as a child. I want them repeated but who will repeat them? The speakers, most of them, have passed over. They are dead.

Haunted by voices, I try to recreate the scenes that my childhood was privy to. I nudge my elder brother to collaborate what I think happened. He remembers it all, even though he was only a couple of years older than me when we sat at the Oval cricket ground and watched Pakistan win. He gently jogs my memory whenever my mind turns leaden. We have spent quality time — as Americans like to call it — re-living the past as children of the Pakistan team manager. America does strange things to people like us who live a life that had its origins thousands of miles away in Pakistan. As our years turn to decades, we reclaim the summer of 1954 whenever someone from that era leaves this world.

I wrote last year from America when Fazal Mahmood died. The flood of memories came cascading down.

Today I write once more. It is from memory once again. Another stalwart of the 1954 series has gone. I sit surrounded with my treasure of photos that I spread on my bed at my new home in Islamabad. Masood Salahuddin figures in most. As assistant manager for the Pakistan cricket team that returned home victorious in 1954, Salahuddin provided the support system that is vital to the success of any venture, be it cricket, politics, industry or governance. Lankily tall, smoking a cigarette, a swish of hair blowing across his brow, is how I remember him.

Cricket came into my life as suddenly as it left. As a precocious pre-teen, I accompanied my family to England and travelled with the team on its six-month tour in the summer of 1954. It is hard to erase the memory of the 20 days spent at sea, where one lived and breathed cricket.

Lazy, long and languorous days spent under an open sun on the huge ship (at least that’s what it seemed to a child’s eye) that took us from Karachi harbour to Southhampton port in England. We saw our cricketers net practice hidden from the rest of the passengers. They laughed, joked, bowled and batted until the shores of England arrived.

On a wet, dreary day, with the drizzle to greet us, the Pakistan team landed on English soil. A coach drove us to London. The man in charge of ensuring that we had all boarded the bus with bag and baggage was Masood Salahuddin.

As a senior railways official, Masood Salahuddin, a cricketer himself, was an excellent administrator. Things ran smoothly under his charge. Not a man given to confusion or idle talk, he took the tour logistics very seriously to ensure that nothing went wrong. Managing the cricketers was a task. Making sure that no one missed the bus or the train, as the Pakistan team toured around England, playing in different cities, was left to the assistant manager whose organizational abilities rose to the challenge. (But reining in the captain and his vice proved impossible at times as you will note from one of the photos here.)

Time waits for no man, nor for the tide, as we well know. A lot of people have written about the victory at Oval in 1954. Omar Qureshi for one. But he too is dead and so are his beautiful writings about people, places and events linked with cricket. Intimacy of the game and its players of the past is fast receding in the background. As is the way of all flesh, a day will come when the summer of 1954 will quietly pass into nothingness. The cold statistics of the matches will survive in cricket books but the pages will be bereft of first-person stories of great people associated with those scores.

I eagerly scan the sports pages to read the obituary of Masood Salahuddin. I am disappointed. Other than Gul Hameed Bhatti and M.U. Haq, the life and times of the great man have been overlooked. Why? It hurts to see the current czars of cricket ignore the men who took Pakistan cricket to dizzying heights that it could ever dream of reaching and that too only seven years after the country wrested independence from England.

Christened as “rabbits” by the then Pakistan’s high commissioner Mr Isphani who deplored cricketers’ table manners and rustic ways, the cricket team trounced its former imperial masters on its own turf in London.

If anyone was to analyze how the “rabbits” brought pride to Pakistan and shame to England, getting the answers is no rocket science. It was the team spirit that won the day. Right from the cricket captain, “skipper” A.H. Kardar, down to the manager and the assistant manager. They worked as a team with just one goal in mind: to win and nothing but win.

This does not mean that the cricket team was one big happy family. Far from it. The manager and his assistant manager wanted to rein in the rebels with their officiousness, but the rebels were the darlings of the crowds and the real stars. Some suffered from oversized egos, others from inferiority complexes. Balancing the different complexes proved to be the biggest balancing act. As an insider (even though young in years) I know the tussles that went on, the intrigues that were never ending, the different camps that erupted and the coup that almost happened.

Heroes too have feet of clay. No one is perfect. So better it is to remain silent on the “skipper” or the “Oval hero” or “Merry Max” or “Marlyn Monroe” or “praying brothers”.

For today’s cricketers and their managers, lessons from the far pavilion are well worth revisiting