How the PSL is bringing Pakistan's swag back

When all's said and done, what is it that you really want? Do you want the swag to return? Or can you live with just the results? And when you get down to it, this really is the question spiraling away unresolved at the heart of modern Pakistan cricket, ever since the #Mighty90s sides broke up. It's probably less a question, more a behavioural test - how you answer is who you are.

You want the swag, and how could you not?

Waqar Younis had one trick for years but, like great magicians, he knew it was about how you sold it. Give his strut a white suit and then try separating him from Travolta. Wasim Akram's swag was entirely in his wrists - though, sometimes his hair too - and how un-swag it could make anyone else look. In that ball-of-all-centuries to Rahul Dravid, he didn't just dismiss Dravid - he dismissed umpire Ramaswamy who had deigned to deny him a dead-on lbw two balls previous.

The true marker of that '90s swag was in how much the lesser shades of genius within the side carried. Aamer Sohail moved around like he was father to Brian Lara and husband to Meghan Markle - in his world he averaged 60, and Bangalore '96 was not a defeat but a win for his owning of Venkatesh Prasad (before he got owned himself, in the real world). Moin Khan was 3% wicketkeeper, 97% swag. And recall even a bit-parter like Basit Ali and how he strolled into the scene one day in 1992 like he was its director.

For years after, Shahid Afridi and Shoaib Akhtar gamely tried to uphold these traditions, and then there was Misbah-ul-Haq.

He had the results. His teams fought and beat all kinds of odds. They had the ranking. They were unbeatable at home. They went to England and got the first creditable result there since the Mighty90s sides. But - and this is the kibosh right here - they went there and got results but made nice. They made - ech! - friends and were - come on! - amiable when the whole point is to beat them, dance all over them and then, for good measure, offend them.

Nowadays, in February and March, it's easy to imagine that the answer to that question could be the PSL. Because the PSL is not so much a T20 league as it is an attempt to recapture some of that old swag and, by the by, hasten the great leap forward in Pakistan's limited-overs game; to help them catch up with the rest of the world, and not, as in the Champions Trophy, pull the world back quixotically to where they have for so long been - playing that '90s-template ODI cricket, where 260 is enough to defend and tough to chase.

And the swag - to use the words of the vlogger of swag, Irfan Junejo - is not coming slow. Hasan Ali has so much of it that it's only a matter of time before its uncontainable force propels him into a major off-field controversy - you can smell that coming, and genuine swag, we all know, is incomplete without controversy.

Shadab Khan has it but in a different, more stable way, that kind of rock-hard inner confidence that would ordinarily be eerie to find in someone so young but is somehow endearing in him.

There's so much more coming. Rumman Raees looks like the kind of guy your mother loves, but with ball in hand he's the one your mother loves, knowwhaddamean?. Fakhar Zaman is wiry and kind of meek but some days, with bat in hand, it's like there's a little Aamer Sohail hiding inside him. And one day Faheem Ashraf's performances will catch up with his swag. There's such a rush of it that even the faux-swag types like Imad Wasim and Ahmed Shehzad can, from certain angles on certain days, pass off as the real thing.

Of course this is all a little - a lot - facetious. It's not as if the PSL has produced any of this. It's not even cricket that has done it. And it's not one thing. But the PSL is giving them the ideal vent to let that swag out, to trial and test it with and against guys like Brendon McCullum or Kieron Pollard.

Sarfraz Ahmed is not a product of the PSL, and you wouldn't look at him and say he has swag necessarily, but him telling Martin Guptill to f*** off recently in New Zealand felt like an articulation of the PSL. If Viv Richards thinks you are the business, after all, of what significance is a Martin Guptill?

Nobody should ever have to use the word "synergy", but, gun to head if one must, then perhaps it is appropriate here. If you are watching the PSL, do yourself a favour and enhance the experience by watching some of the videos around it. In particular, watch the collaboration between Patari Music, Islamabad United and the aforementioned Irfan Junejo (watch his vlogs anyway, PSL or no PSL).

They capture the natural - sorry - synergy between the best expressions of Pakistanica: music, cricket (and sport in general) and pop culture, in the process producing the best visual and aural illustration of this swag. Turn the commentary off if you're watching the PSL on TV and stick this stuff on. It's much more the right soundtrack.

Here's a postscript, though. Learning to swag before you can walk, let alone run or fly, is dangerous. To have as big a corruption scam as the PSL did so early in its life - one that is still rumbling away - should be cause for greater concern than it has been. Swag brings complacency and arrogance, that heady imposter of a feeling that you can do no wrong and nothing can go wrong. It did in the '90s and it can do again.

Otherwise, it's a no-brainer. The swag is returning and even if the results don't, it may not matter. As is one byproduct of all such leagues, international results become less and less relevant. In the PSL, after all, Pakistan always wins. What more do you want?