It may be semantic nit-picking but the New Zealand tour was not called off

Omar Kureishi15-May-2002It may be semantic nit-picking but the New Zealand tour was not called off. The tour had proceeded without a hitch and the three One-day Internationals had been played as well as one Test match. It was just the last match that was abandoned for reasons that had nothing to do with cricket.It is imperative that it is understood that the New Zealand team was not the target if they were in any danger because of blast, so too was the Pakistan team who were staying in the same hotel. There is no denying that it must have been traumatising and cancelling the Test match was the most obvious course of action, players of both teams being in no mental frame of mind to play.There is much pessimistic talk that the future of Pakistan cricket has been put in jeopardy and no foreign team is likely to tour Pakistan in the near future. Particularly at risk is Australia’s tour. If Pakistan is a high risk country, so too is every other country in the world. We are living in extremely dangerous times.Unlike the IRA and the Tamil Tigers which can be described as vertical terrorism, the terrorism against which a war is being waged, is horizontal. It knows no frontiers, no boundaries. There are no obvious targets. Who, in his wildest imagination, could have foretold the attack on the World Trade Centre or the Pentagon? Or, for that matter, what happened at the Sheraton Hotel, in Karachi?International terrorism must come in the same category as a natural disaster. This is the case that the PCB must place before the Australian Cricket Board. Whatever is humanly possible to provide security to the Australian team will be done, as it was, in the case of the New Zealand team. Can the United Cricket Board of South Africa give a water-tight guarantee that terrorists will not strike during one of the matches of the World Cup 2003? Of course, it can’t.International media, particularly television channels, have done a loathsome job in projecting Pakistan as a volatile country. Pakistan’s law and order situation may not be as good as we would want it to be but life goes on as it does in other countries which are as safe or as dangerous. Let me just add here that as far back as 1974, when I was manager of the Pakistan touring England, we twice had to evacuate our hotel rooms because of bomb threats. The IRA was pretty active in those days. The thought of abandoning the tour never crossed our mind. These bomb threats were real.I think there is a need to be level-headed. At the time of the bomb blast, a certain amount of hysteria was perfectly understandable as it is understandable that the New Zealand players should feel traumatised though I must say that the Pakistan players who too were “five minutes away from death”, (Stephen Fleming’s words) seem to have steadied their nerves.The West Indies are concerned with the form of Brian Lara but the Indians should be concerned with the form of Sachin Tendulkar. At the start of the series, there was much hype about the series deciding who was the greater batsman. But cricket is a great leveller. As in the case of Inzamamul Haq who too went through a wretched lean patch and bounced back with a triple century, I am sure that both Lara and Tendulkar will soon shrug off this lean patch and runs will start flowing from their bats. Presently, they are proving that, like the rest of us, they are mere mortals. And a good thing too because cricket is a team game and no individual is bigger than the game. But what you lose of the swing, you gain on the roundabout.Tendulkar’s failure have placed a greater responsibility on the other Indian batsmen and Saurav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and Vangipurappu Laxman are coming through and as a bonus so too is Ratra with a superb hundred.For the West Indies, Carl Hooper and Shivnarine Chanderpaul seem to be in top form while Ramnaresh Sarwan continues to bat with great fluency but seems to lose his concentration just when it seems that he is set for the big one.Sri Lanka will find the going tough since they are touring in the first half of the summer when it is cold and wet and the ball seams about. Without Muttiah Muralitharan, they are half the team.England have chosen to go backwards and have recalled Alec Stewart and John Crawley and Sri Lanka on its part have included that old war horse Aravinda de Silva. Strange that I should call him an old war horse since I first saw him play as a teenager and I still remember him hooking Imran Khan for a six at Faisalabad. I was doing the commentary and was momentarily speechless.The recall of these ‘veterans’ is an admission that there is a lot of difference between Test cricket and the one-day game. In Test cricket, the premium is on experience.Sir Vivian Richards was a part of the commentary team for the Antigua Test match. I think it would be fair to say that he was a better batsman than he is a commentator. But he is still capable of being outrageous. He was asked by Harsha Bhogle (with great reverence) why he (Richards) did not wear a helmet. He said that he liked to chomp on his chewing gum and the helmet interfered with that.”You have to be comfortable when you are batting,” he said. What an advertisement for chewing gum. He could have made a fortune from Wrigley’s.Viv is also somewhat guarded in his comments. He would have liked to say more about Hooper’s decision to put India in after winning the toss. Hooper probably thinks he still has Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose in his team.Star Sports interviewed Wasim Jaffer and the interview ended up as a coaching lesson by Geoff Boycott. The young batsman had played a jewel of an innings. It seemed singularly inappropriate to be telling what he was doing wrong.