Wounded Tiger by Peter Oborne

Peter Oborne is a political journalist with a pleasing sideline in cricket books; meaty, important cricket books that fill gaps in cricket scholarship. His biography of Basil D’Oliveira was masterful. He has followed it with Wounded Tiger, a history of cricket in Pakistan.

Has a cricket book ever been based on so much hard journalism? In an era when Pakistan is regarded as a no-go zone for westerners, his pursuit of the facts took him not only to the main centres of Lahore and Karachi, but also to places such as Peshawar, an hour away from the border with Afghanistan, where western visitors are usually war reporters not cricket historians. He records his inability to go to Baluchistan and Kashmir (the most militarised place in the world, we learn) as if it amounted to professional negligence. All in the cause of cricket scholarship.

The collection of primary evidence through interviews was essential because source documentary material on the early days of Pakistan cricket does not exist. I have been reading reviews of the latest work by the pre-eminent Tudor historian John Guy, (my tutor at Bristol University a long time ago). Addressing himself to the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, Guy has done what he always does: he has gone back to the primary sources and rebuilt the story. He had more to work on from England four centuries ago than Oborne has on Pakistan cricket a few decades past. Of course, many of the oral accounts are incomplete and contradictory, but Oborne guides us through them skilfully.

His biography of D’Oliveira and its account of cricket under Apartheid dealt with the old canard that cricket and politics should not mix. Like non-white South Africans, Pakistani players might have wished that they had the luxury of choice. Pakistan’s cricket emerged from politics in its rawest form: the turmoil of the partition of India in 1947. Some of the most famous names of the early decades of Pakistan cricket were among the the millions of Muslims forced to flee to the new country, including the five Mohammad brothers, four of whom were to play test cricket. I saw Mushtaq and Sadiq play often enough in county cricket, but had not appreciated how perilous their early lives had been.

Politics sets the game’s parameters today more than ever. The UAE appears to be an indefinite home from home, while relations with India mean that Pakistani cricketers—only Pakistani cricketers—are forbidden to milk the golden goat that is the IPL.

As millions struggled their way north and west in 1947, one Muslim was making the journey in the opposite direction. Fazal Mahmood travelled from Punjab in the north of the emerging country to Poona, “an insanely dangerous journey for a twenty-year-old Muslim male”. He had been selected in the Indian team for the tour of Australia and he was determined to make the training camp, oblivious to the chaos and danger, but eventually had to give in to political inevitability.

Fazal Mahmood is the first of heroes of Pakistan cricket whose stories Oborne tells; Wounded Tiger begins ingeniously with Fazal in the crowd at the Oval, watching as England wins the Ashes in 1953. A year later he was back, bowling Pakistan to series-squaring victory with twelve wickets.

That the young country was playing test cricket at all was remarkable, given that its domestic cricket was sparse and somewhat chaotic. How come it was granted almost immediate test status? Oborne puts it down to a victory against an MCC touring team (missing a few big names) in 1951. India proposed Pakistan and England seconded. Perhaps the inclusion of a seventh test team to fill an empty summer in 1954 appealed to Lord’s.

The safe passage of the Mohammad brothers was as well for Pakistan’s first decades of test cricket. Hanif Mohammad usually batted as if surviving a nuclear winter, the essence of a young nation making its way against the odds. Oborne presents Mushtaq Mohammad as one of Pakistan’s most under-rated and best captains, genially presiding over one of its most successful periods in the 1970s.

By then, most of the Pakistan team were familiar to us on the county circuit. Sarfraz Nawaz bustling in with short, angry steps at Northampton; Imran Khan, filmstar pace at Worcester and Hove; Zaheer Abbas, a double and single hundred in one game at Canterbury in the golden summer of ‘76. Above all, Asif Iqbal, dancing down the pitch to lash it through the covers. (How uncomfortable that the source of Pakistani matchfixing can be traced to Sharjah while Asif was in charge there). That county experience, and Kerry Packer, turned Pakistan’s players into professionals, no longer happy to be amateurs with jobs tied to the game.

Javed Miandad comes out of this account well. He has often been presented in the western press as some sort of upstart street urchin. In fact, his origins were firmly middle-class. Oborne credits him with accepting the captaincy at difficult times then gracefully stepping down for Imran Khan whenever the great man made himself available.

Oborne (who, it might be noted, has usually written for right-wing newspapers) is consistently critical of the attitudes of the English players, administrators and media towards Pakistan. He is scathing about the Idrais Baig incident on the MCC (in modern terms an England A team) tour in 1955, using MCC archives to tell a more complete version of the story than has been available before.

Baig was an umpire whose performance had displeased the MCC players. In Peshawar, Baig was taken from his hotel, bound and gagged, moved across town and then drenched with water. It was serious assault, but was laughed off by the MCC team and management as only a joke, the go-to excuse for bullies through the ages.

Oborne’s assessment of the “finger-wagging” incident at Faisalabad in 1987 is that it was incompetently handled by those in charge on both sides. But he makes a telling comment about Mike Gatting: “It is hard to come to grips with the set of values which led the England captain to take such a strong stand against allegedly poor Pakistani umpiring, yet be relaxed enough about apartheid to take a rebel squad to South Africa”.

The middle part of the book tends towards a series-by-series recitation. There is much good cricket played by many good cricketers—Abdul Qadir’s story is told with particular relish—as well as a good deal of selectorial mercuriality, players falling out, administrators with varying degrees of competence and cricketing knowledge, and a revolving door approach to the captaincy. The clues to how this came about are littered through the book and often come down to politics, cricketing, national and international.

The story of last quarter-century is related in themes and is the best part of the book. There is the glorious story of reverse swing, a new dimension to the game achieved only with immense skill; needless to say, the British press assumed it was those Pakistanis cheating again.  

The chapter on betting and match-fixing is the book’s saddest. It is clear that Pakistan cricket has been cursed (Oborne’s description) by the bookmakers for several decades. He makes an interesting comparison with prohibition in the United States in the 1920s, concluding that a legalised and regulated cricket betting market would be the best way of exercising control. He visited Mohammad Amir while the young bowler was serving his ban for the Lord’s no-balls. Oborne finds him playing tapeball cricket with the other village lads. He rightly presents the brilliant young bowler as a victim who stood little chance of being able to resist the massive pressure he came under from bookmakers and senior players. I am pleased to have seen Mohammad Amir play at the Basin Reserve earlier this year and hope that the cricket fraternity welcomes him when Pakistan’s tour of the UK begins in a couple of weeks.

I had not understood before reading the book how cricket was an urban, middle-class sport in Pakistan, and that its spread to the lower classes and the rural north and west is recent. Pakistan has achieved a broadening of interest in the game that the ECB and ICC aspire to but can’t deliver. One consequence has been the emergence of Afghanistan as a cricketing country: poppies on a battlefield.

Of course, 9/11 changed everything for Pakistan cricket. Home test matches were spasmodic thereafter, and ended indefinitely with the attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in 2009. Out of that and the spot fixing scandal emerges the final hero of the story: Misbah-ul-Haq.

Misbah took over the Test captaincy with his predecessor facing imprisonment, unusually difficult circumstances even when judged by the regicidal standards of that office. What’s more, he was a 36-year-old batsman who had never quite established himself in the test side. Oborne sums up:

The task that he faced was more difficult than any previous Test captain, including Kardar. He had to lead a cricket team in exile, deal with constant charges of corruption and match-fixing, and confront a chaotic administration.

Almost six years later, Misbah is still there having won more tests than any other captain of Pakistan with a victory percentage only fractionally below Wasim Akram’s lead mark, all without playing a single test at home.

Needless to say, some of the most famous names in Pakistan cricket are calling for him to be replaced for the tour of England. At this time, more than any, they were lucky to stumble upon him.

My most serious criticism of this fine book is the statement on page 261 that Wasim Bari was in 1976 “the world’s top wicketkeeper”. Readers would, I think, be disappointed if I did not assert the rights of the Kentish candidate to that title.

Wounded Tiger was Wisden’s Book of the Year in 2015 and deservedly so. We must hope that Peter Oborne will soon shine his torch of journalism and scholarship into another of cricket’s dusty corners.

Basil D’Oliveira by Peter Oborne

For those unfamiliar with one of cricket’s most famous stories, Basil D’Oliveira was a South African cricketer of immense talent who would have become one of his country’s great cricketers if only the colour of his skin had not been a tad too dark for the tastes of his country’s Apartheid rulers. Instead, D’Oliveira (who was Cape-coloured in the nauseating vocabulary of that place and time) and his compatriots were condemned to performing on rough wasteland. On the evening before any game the players would gather to clear stones from the designated pitch area (there was no such thing as a cricket square). National representation was limited to white players, who played on the manicured fields that D’Oliveira could see from his home in Cape Town’s Bo-Kaap, but could never play on.

D’Oliveira’s ambition led him to look for possibilities outside his homeland. Persistence secured him a contract with Middleton in the Central Lancashire League in 1960. From there his talent took him to a county career with Worcestershire and 44 Tests for England. In 1968 he was selected to tour South Africa (after originally being omitted), which caused the South Africa’s Prime Minister Johannes Vorster to cancel the tour, and thus hasten his country’s long period of sporting isolation.

It is a story of some personal significance for me. D’Oliveira was first picked for England in 1966 when I was a young fan enjoying his first cricket season. I was drawn to his forceful, fluent batting, while the nascent proof reader and pedant within was intrigued that a name could have an apostrophe in it, or—wrongly according to Oborne—sometimes be written beginning with a lower case letter.

If 1966 was my cricketing foundation year, then 1968 was the start of political awareness, triggered not by events on the streets of Prague or Paris that momentous summer, but by those in the committee rooms of Lord’s. The understanding that a man could be refused a place on a cricket team on the grounds of colour was a shock; that South Africa was organised on racial grounds with whites the superior race was incomprehensible.  As a nine year old I knew that the proposition that people with other-than-white skins were inferior in some way to be a nonsense. My certainty on this matter was because I had seen Garry Sobers, Rohan Kanhai, Wes Hall, Clive Lloyd, John Shepherd, Asif Iqbal, Basil D’Oliveira and others play cricket. No further information was required.

I have taken too long to acquire Peter Oborne’s 2004 re-telling of the D’Oliveira story. It won every award for which it was eligible, and deservedly so. Oborne is a political journalist with a love of cricket, which is the right way round for this assignment. He explains the historical and political contexts—everything to this story—with the utmost clarity and brings the skills of a journalist accustomed to revealing the mysteries of Westminster to the task of unravelling the events around the selection of the MCC touring party in August 1968.

Oborne is particularly strong on D’Oliveira’s cricketing career in South Africa before he left for England. He argues that D’Oliveira was so good a young player that had it not been for the whites-only policy he would have been selected for the South African touring party to England in 1951, 15 years before he finally played Test cricket at the age of 34 (D’Oliveira maintained the fiction that he was 31 at that time; he believed that he would not have been selected had his real age been known). His actual Test career was a proud one: five hundreds, an average of 40 and a partnership breaker with his deceptively plain medium-pace bowling. But Oborne makes a persuasive case that had D’Oliveira’s talent been allowed to flourish unfettered by Apartheid he would have been one of the great players.

It is impossible to read without outrage the description of the indignities that were part of the everyday life of D’Oliveira and every other non-white South African. The deep imprint that daily humiliation leaves on a human being was shown by D’Oliveira’s constant unease during his first days in England:

The following day Kay[i] and D’Oliveira caught the train to Manchester. As they walked down the platform, D’Oliveira asked anxiously which was his separate carriage, but Kay firmly told him that things were not done that way in Britain…Kay told Arlott later that “he dined on the train, a factor that he could not get over because he was allowed to eat and travel with white people”

 It is incredible that the argument that politics and sport should not be mixed gained such traction in those years.

Osborne’s account reflects very differently upon the reputations of two of the heroes of my youth. John Arlott, the great commentator and writer, had been appalled by his experiences in South Africa as the BBC’s man on the 1948/9 MCC tour. So when letters in green ink from an unknown South African seeking a league contract began to arrive in the late fifties they were taken seriously. Arlott’s copious humanity made him determined to secure his correspondent the position as a league professional that was his dream. The political Arlott knew that if successful, he would be striking a blow against Apartheid, though he could not have predicted how great a blow it would be. Without John Arlott, there would have been no story to tell.

Colin Cowdrey, on the other hand, emerges as a man of straw. During the South African tour business Cowdrey assured D’Oliveira of his support while arguing against his selection in the privacy of the committee room, his responsibilities as captain compromised by his need to be universally well thought of.

Oborne’s analysis of the events around the selection of the MCC tour party to South Africa in 1968 is forensic. He concludes that there was no conspiracy to omit D’Oliveira. Examination of the sequence of events around the selection has never supported the view that there was. Not even the bunglers of Lord’s could have conspired with such incompetence.

D’Oliveira had had a poor tour of the West Indies in the early months of 1968. He had become a drinker comparatively late in life and was making up for lost time; late nights on the rum had taken their toll. Here was a chance, had it so wanted, for the Establishment to sideline D’Oliveira for the summer. Yet he was selected for the first Ashes Test, won by Australia, and top scored with an unbeaten 87 in the second innings. Then he was dropped.

The conspiracy kicking in? If so, it had no resolve. D’Oliveira had a below-average summer with Worcestershire and made no case for a recall up to and including the naming of the twelve for the final Test, from which he was omitted. Debate about the political viability of the tour all but ceased so unlikely had D’Oliveira’s selection become. Then Roger Prideaux, the Northamptonshire opener (and former Kent player), dropped out and was somewhat improbably replaced with D’Oliveira, a middle-order batsman. Had there been a plot to exclude D’Oliveira this lifeline would never have been thrown.

He grabbed it with such relish. 158, gloriously made, and, as a bowler, the breakthrough as the final hour of the game began, opening the door for Derek Underwood to mesmerise the remaining Australians on a drying pitch for a series-levelling victory. Now, they had to pick D’Oliveira, surely.

There were ten people in the six-hour selection meeting—the four selectors, Cowdrey, tour manager Les Ames (who had dealt with D’Oliveira’s drinking issues in the Caribbean) and four representatives of MCC (in whose name England toured in those days). Oborne talked to chairman of the selectors Doug Insole and studied all available accounts. Insole told the assembled group that that they should proceed as if they were picking a team to tour Australia. The political context was not referred to, which is not to say that it was not a factor.

Oborne believes that “at least one of the people in the room was acting as a spy for South Africa”. Others were aware of backdoor communications from the highest levels in the Cape affirming that the tour would be cancelled were D’Oliveira picked. Oborne does not go quite as far as he might have done in exploring the effect that this knowledge had on proceedings.

Though it would be unfair to cast all those present at the selection meeting as apologists for Apartheid, the view that sport and politics should be separate would have found no dissenters. The idea that the cancellation of a major tour would result from their deliberations would have been anathema to every one of them. It seems to me that this knowledge was enough to sway them, enough to explain why, as Oborne says, D’Oliveira had no strong advocates.

Oborne outlines the cricketing argument against D’Oliveira’s selection and points out that Colin Milburn (a player born in the wrong time if ever there was) also missed out, and that Ken Barrington nearly did so. Prideaux and the young Keith Fletcher (despite a famously disastrous debut at Headingley a few weeks before) were picked.

The all-rounder position went to Tom Cartwright, who was no more a true all-rounder, worth picking as a batsman or bowler, than D’Oliveira. They were at opposite ends of the all-rounder spectrum, D’Oliveira a No 5 or 6 batsman who could trundle efficiently, Cartwright a medium pacer of renowned parsimony (77-32-118-2 v Australia at Old Trafford in 1964—glad I missed that one) but a No 8 or 9 in a Test order at best.

Cartwright was one of the few left-wing cricketers, and Oborne raises the possibility that his withdrawal through injury two weeks was politically inspired. Though D’Oliveira was not a like-for-like replacement—Insole had made a point of saying that he was regarded as a batsmen only in South African conditions—a fortnight of furore had made the selectors repentant, and his addition to the touring party was a formality, as inevitable as the subsequent cancellation of the tour by the appalling Vorster.

Oborne timed his book well, sufficiently distanced from the events for historical perspective, but while many of the protagonists were still alive and talking. The result is one of cricket’s most important pieces of literature. It is clear-headed and insightful about the cricket and the politics. Most of all it does justice to its subject, portraying D’Oliveira as a man of decency and dignity, and reminding us what a fine cricketer he was.

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[i] John Kay, cricket correspondent of the Manchester Evening News whose contacts had secured D’Oliveira his contract with Middleton.