When Waqar Younis ran in to bowl in Karachi against South Africa and England
When Waqar Younis ran in to bowl in Karachi against South Africa and England, 30,000 fans whacked empty water bottles against the seat in front: it sounded like a hurricane alert Tomorrow, there will be jeers. Some of this is merely a matter of planning.So far, Wasim Akram has placed his fielders with a striking lack of wit, and this in games where the pressure was off. If he persists with the no-one-on-the-leg-side field he seems to favour, India’s batsmen will just smack their lips and tuck in. India will depend heavily, as always, on Anil Kumble, one of three Bangalore players in the home side (Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad also hail from the Garden City).But probably the decisive element will be the crowd. Pakistan’s batting – with Aamir Sohail, Ijaz Ahmed and Inzaman-ul-Haq in exotic form – has been forceful and consistent enough to recover the ground lost in the field. Who said cricket was boring?On paper, Pakistan might just have the edge (India’s game plan so far has been for the other side to drop catches, and it has been only partly successful). But this match is on grass, and Indian grass at that, so it would be churlish to predict an outcome.
He even got into trouble once with his own mullahs for attaching his own sacred first name to a Reebok shoe There really could not be more at stake. In a nice twist to the clean religious divide between the teams, India’s captain – Mohammed Azharuddin – is a Muslim. The Times of India modestly referred to the match as one between “Cricketing Gods” and concluded, with a nod to India’s two recent defeats: “may the worse side win”.This first quarter-final of the World Cup is also – as if it mattered – the start of the tournament proper, the first match which both sides have to win. Pakistan have not played in India for nine years (since 1987, when they won a Test match in, as it happens, Bangalore).
India even boycotted the annual one-day tussle in Sharjah after Pakistan beat them with the help of three consecutive lbw decisions. In three hours 45,000 tickets were snapped up, and there were scuffles when the crowd sensed that large blocks of seats were being withheld for last-minute VIPs.It is not as if this match was a regular event. When tickets went on sale on Sunday 60,000 people beat a path to the stadium; many of them camped out for the night. There have also been threats to dig up the pitch – no easy task, on these hard-baked bowler’s graveyards) The response has been, well, typical.
Only this week, there were calls for the Pakistan players to be barred from entering the country.But they are not ducking out of this one, and the security presence in Bangalore is, not surprisingly, huge: machine guns, sniffer dogs, the works. The Pakistanis, who were vociferously scornful of Australia’s decision to avoid Sri Lanka, have twice cancelled tours to India (in 1992 and 1993) because of the threat from Hindu supremacists. And at the beginning of this tournament they had no trouble forming a combined team to play Sri Lanka. But no one else can ignore the historic animosity that charges these matches.