A Cricketing parable for our times

October 2024 Blog

Pakistan was thrashed by England in the first Test with young Harry Brook even hitting 300. Cue a collective wail and chest-beating all over the country. The board is sacked, star players are sacked, relative unknowns come in, the same pitch is used.

Lo and behold – in an exciting second Test, Pakistan win.

Surely it cannot happen again in the Third Test. The same team, the same tactics, a similar pitch, and the English roll over. Cue joy and fire-crackers all over the country. Zindabad.

Is there a parable here? When all seems done and dusted, and all seems lost – one can still turn things around, with a plan, with willpower, with focus, with determination, and with collective effort.

I am still taking in this, almost, unique and dramatic switch in fortunes in the annals of Test cricket. How could it happen? Is there a parable in this for us all?

Can we use the same spin guile and pre-prepped pitches to turn around Pakistan’s economy. Can we try to recall get hold of all those national skills and resources that have ebbed away through brain drain, and banking shifts to the so-called West, to revive the fortunes of the country? Sack some of the old stagers and call in fresh unknowns to bowl some googlies and leg breaks?

Wishful thinking I know, but the cricketers have given us all a lift. Hope, Change is possible. Even when all seems lost.

Yes, too much to expect this to turn around the Gaza crisis? Or to get Putin and Zelensky to jaw-jaw rather than War-war, to use Churchill’s famous phrase. Or to wonder a global order teetering over relations between Presidents Trump and Xi?!

Ah well. Thank you Sajid and Noman, the destructive spin twins, for a welcome break in the cycles of despondency and despair. And just perhaps, perhaps, some of us Noon Scholars might be ready to heed the call to come back to sail the ship into blue waters.

Paul Flather

Chair, VNEF