Subedar Major Haq and a Company of Sepoys

In this the150th anniversary year of the rebellion of 1857, a good way of understanding the Pakistani squad is to see it as a company of turbulent sepoys. The Pakistan Cricket Board is the palace, racked by coups and intrigue. There's no real constituted authority, no legitimizing election (this being a pre-modern state) and every now and then the portly JCO in nominal charge of Pak Company, is challenged by an ambitious deputy.

Their dashing colonel who, some years ago, had whipped them into a fighting unit with a strange mix of paternalism, coercion, egotism and personal example, and successfully led them into battle, is now retired but watches from the sidelines. He doesn't approve of the foreign mercenary who has taken the sepoys in hand and sometimes allows his patrician exasperation with his talented but plebeian proteges, to show.

Looking at this endearing mob of M.A.S.H. style misfits, you wouldn't know that it is, in fact, a company of elite soldiers, first-rate fighting men. Those two big fellows over there in glitzy mufti, shamming injury, and suspected of emptying some dull opiate to the drains till a few weeks ago, were the squad's death-or-glory artillery boys, its big guns. Then their habits got to them. Now they're convalescing, poor chaps, certain to miss the big battles coming up.

But the company is so crammed with talented, testosterone-driven heroes that their absence shouldn't necessarily hamstring its forthcoming campaign. Subedar Major I.U. Haq has great phlegm and can hold a position forever. Lance Naik Afridi, urf Shaheed, (sometimes reduced to the ranks for recklessness beyond the call of duty), can turn a skirmish into a rout single-handed, but it is never clear whether his actions will cause Pak Company to be the router or the routee. Naib Subedar Yousuf, always a fine marksman, has in the past year become infallible, his conversion ratio of shots to hits nearly perfect. Subedar Y. Khan, a fine strategic thinker and no mean shot himself, was long ago singled out by Colonel I. Khan (no relation) as officer material.

One of the recurrent frustrations of Pak Company has been its inexplicable failure to defeat the Light Blues in world tourneys despite defeating them in other, bilateral battles. Subedar Major Haq has been working on this with Pak Company's new secret weapon: the prayer huddle. This formation's solitary drawback is the possibility of being ambushed from behind while bonding in faith. Naib Subedar Yousuf, however, has solved that problem by suggesting that Sepoy Kaneria, surplus to requirement in the prayer huddle as Yousuf himself once was, ought to act as a look-out.

On the face of it, Pak Company shouldn't have a prayer this time round: it comes to the tournament without its fastest and best bowlers, uncertainty about its opening pair, and a recurrent tendency to come unglued in moments of stress. Colonel Khan, who is an expert witness as far as Pakistan is concerned, thinks that the team's preparation for the World Cup has been the worst ever that he can recall and I'm not going to argue with him.

But if I was a betting man looking for big returns on a small investment, I'd put some money on Inzamam's men. The Pakistan team has two things going for it:

a) The absence of Shoaib Akhtar is a huge bonus whether the team knows it or not. The operatic absurdness of his behavour subverted the authority of the coach and deranged the whole team.

b) Pak Company is never short of talent. It's selectors behave like fickle recruiting sergeants, drafting in gifted eagle-eyed rookies and then dumping them after a skirmish or two. A case in point is Sepoy A. Mehmood, a fine all-terrain fighter, forced to seek foreign employment because he inexplicably fell out of favour. Most teams would find their cupboards bare after such prodigal behaviour, but Pakistan still has all the fast bowling talent it needs and in Afridi, Razzaq, Mehmood and Shoaib Malik, it has a string of ODI all-rounders who can, when the stars align and when they remember to put their brains in gear, turn matches on their own. It goes without saying that in Younis Khan, Inzamam-ul-Haq and Mohammad Yousuf, the team has batsmen of real class.

Pakistan's largest liability is its captain, who seems to have outsourced inspiration and leadership to that offshore Entity, the great Call Centre in the Sky. Contrast the way Inzamam blundered about, clueless, in the team's confrontation with Darrell Hair, with Ranatunga's clinical, ruthless defence of Muralitharan when he was called for chucking in Australia. Whatever the rights and wrongs of those confrontations, Ranatunga was in charge of events while Inzamam was hostage to them. If World Cup rules (like those of the Davis Cup) allowed non-playing captains and if Colonel I. Khan was willing to fill that bill, Pakistan would a real contender for the Cup. Even without a first-rate captain, Pak Company remains a serious threat to every other team in the competition.