Pakistan's six years of drought and hope

Saadat Hasan Manto is celebrated today across the subcontinent as one of its most evocative writers, particularly for his ability to tell the unforgettable tales of the horrors of Partition. Yet during his lifetime, his unflinching stories led to several obscenity charges and controversies. These did not bother him - he would pithily retort that he was simply holding a mirror up to society; it wasn't his fault if people didn't like what they saw.

It is a rough analogy, but Pakistani cricket - if we are to imagine it as some living, gasping organism - is going through something similar. It has come under increasingly harsh and cruel persecution for the last few years. Yet despite how much people blame the shoddiness of the characters or the pace of the narrative, Pakistan cricket can conceivably turn around and tell them that its story over the last decade is the story of the country itself.

When 2006 ended, it was the seventh year in eight that Pakistan had finished with a positive win-loss record in ODIs - a feat the team had never achieved in more than three consecutive years till then. Around the same time, it was witnessing a revolution in its global image, led by a ruler who was being feted on The Daily Show; fuelled by a rampant (aid-driven) economy; and articulated by new heroes in fashion, music and television.

A year later, however, everything fell apart. The country was wracked by two different insurgencies, the liberal dictator shut down all the news channels, a popular leader was assassinated, and elections were postponed. Also in 2007, the cricket team had its worst ever World Cup, its worst year in ODIs since 1988, and was at one point accused of murdering its beloved coach.

The two years after that were not only the bloodiest of the insurgency, but also saw first Test cricket and then all international cricket leave the country. Since then, other than in 2008, when their results were buoyed by contests against minnows, and a surprisingly good World Cup in 2011, Pakistan haven't ended a single year since 2007 with more wins than losses. The year 2013, in which a euphoric election campaign was followed by sobering election results, was the only one with a flat 1:1 win-loss ratio.

Yet the diagnoses of Pakistan cricket remain fixated on a few star players, quibbles over approaches, and fights over who runs the board. The stats, particularly those to do with batting, are unequivocal. In the six years up until the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, Pakistan's ODI average and run rates were fourth among Test-playing nations. Since the attack, Pakistan have slipped to eight and nine respectively. Bangladesh, a team often discussed with contempt around these parts, finished higher on both counts over the past six years, and so Pakistan's recent whitewashing at their hands was less a shock and more about the law of averages coming good.

In both the country's cricket and its politics, the causes for the post-2007 implosion had built up during the boom years. The contradictory military alliances forged during the early 2000s resulted in the devastating blowback later in the decade, while the failure to secure a transition from a powerful team was the chief problem in cricket. The inherent tensions of Inzamam-ul-Haq's era came to a boil after his departure, and three years of infighting and calamitous leadership by the board came to a head with the spot-fixing scandal - which was not just a culmination of events from the then-recent past but also a consequence of mistakes from a decade ago. Then, the Qayyum Report had sought to brush the scourge of match-fixing under the rug with lenient punishments. Little wonder that the next generation acted as if it was unaccountable.

Indeed, for this next generation - memorably labelled the Lost Generation by Hassan Cheema - this period of rampant instability was when they were meant to come of age. Yet looking at a list of Pakistani debutants whose peak should have come around the 2007-11 period, you see it almost entirely comprises players who underperformed and/or were involved in illegal activities.

Given that most of the problems lie in the batting, it is instructive to look there. Apart from Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan, both from an older generation, there is a significant dearth of quality in the list above. The likes of Mohammad Hafeez, Shoaib Malik, Kamran Akmal, Imran Farhat and Salman Butt, who make the core of this generation, all average in the mid-30s or below in ODIs, and all have seen their erstwhile averages plummet in the post-attack era. Indeed, they have all largely been upstaged by a younger generation, with the likes of Umar Akmal, Ahmed Shehzad, and even Azhar Ali and Asad Shafiq, averaging 40 or above in the last six years. The only relative exception among his peers is Hafeez - but his tragicomedy deserves a separate telling.

These last six years of ending each year in the negative and constantly being forced back by various tragedies have still been a period of rebuilding. Like the democratic transition in politics, the shyly spectacular growth in Test matches has been a source of joy and proof of resilience. Like the country's music, its bowling might no longer be producing the demigods of previous eras, but it has greater underground diversity and more alternative-indie charms than ever before. Like its much-maligned youth at large, Pakistan's young players are doing better than they are given credit for, and are not quite as vacuous as their selfies would suggest. But much like with the characters of Manto's stories, to understand their seemingly grotesque actions we must recognise the causes and conditions that led to them.