Fawad Alam Proves His Point Yet Again - South Africa V Pakistan

Fawad Alam Proves His Point Yet Again - South Africa V Pakistan - Day 2

By Sikander Hayat

Fawad Alam played a masterful innings in the first innings of the first Test match against South Africa in Karachi. He scored 109 runs, played 245 balls and stayed on the wicket for 353 minutes in a mammoth effort to bring Pakistan back into the Test match at Karachi cricket stadium. There were no fans in the stadium to enjoy this innings live but Fawad Alam proved yet again that his exclusion from Pakistan Cricket Team for last ten years was a big mistake and that Pakistan wasted a major talent by pursuing wrong selection policies.

Fawad Alam is now 35 years old and can only serve Pakistan like Misbah for another few years if he stays fit and keeps scoring but he has been successful in at least doing one thing and that is to prove that he is an international level talent who should never have been dropped from Pakistan after one series in which he scored a big hundred against Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka.
Fawad Alam was ably support by Muhammad Rizwan and especially Fahim Ashraf who scored a fifty and was involved in a hundred runs partnership with Fawad Alam. Pakistan now has more than 80 runs lead and has 2 wickets in hand. Which is just as good because

Pakistan is on very occasions able to score more than 150 runs to win a test match in a fourth innings of a test match. Pakistan will have to restrict South Africa to around 200 to have any chance of winning this test match and Pakistan needs a win really badly given what has happened in the last 12 months to this cricket side. While India is achieving the highest honors (beating Australia in Australia), Pakistan has been plumbing the depths of defeat. The latest loss was to New Zealand in New Zealand.

Pakistan has a new region based cricket set up with few very strong teams and tough competition. This new set up will take time to bring results to the Pakistan international team but seems like a step in the right direction.
Pakistan has welcomed a major international cricket team after more than a decade after the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore by the Taliban sympathizers in Pakistan who attacked the bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team on March 3rd, 2009 in which nine people were injured including six Sri Lankan cricketers.

Pakistan cricket has suffered a great deal during these years of wilderness. Pakistan cricket players have to travel to foreign countries for months on end without their families, wives, children and friends. Living all your existence in hotels is not an easy lifestyle choice but choice was one thing that was not available to Pakistan players.
Still England, Australia and New Zealand will have to visit Pakistan for this rehabilitation of cricket in Pakistan to be completed.

On the other hand, India will never visit Pakistan under the Modi regime but that is not a change as Pakistan and India have only occasionally played Test matches against each other in the last fifty years or so. Even in limited overs cricket, Pakistan and India face each other in International tournaments only and that is once in a blue moon occasion.
Pakistan is a society which works on connections and it looks like Fawad Alam did not have connections in high places to keep him in the Pakistan international eleven. How many others

are out there in the domestic cricket scene of Pakistan who are going through a similar treatment as Fawad Alam did at the hands of Pakistani cricket selectors. My guess is that quite a few.
Case of Fawad Alam is not a curious case in Pakistani context as Pakistani society is based on connections and an individual without connections is basically a nobody. This is not merely a problem of achievement but mere existence can become problematic in a society where you have to know someone to get anything done. For example, you need a new electricity connection. It is not sufficient that one lodges an application, completes all required documentation and eventually an electric meter will be installed in your house.

That is not how things work in Pakistan. You have to pay money to someone incharge to make your application move and the cycle of bribery does not end with the person in charge, money has to be paid to clerks, installers and every person in between.
The fight against corruption was lost a long time ago and figures like Fawad Alam are just a symptom of a wider disease. Political parties give tickets to candidates on the basis of who can pay the most money to the leadership at the local and the national level. Civil service jobs

are allocated based on connections and whole fucking country is built on nepotism and cronyism. I am sure the situation is not very different in large parts of India and Bangladesh as corruption DNA crosses across international borders in South Asia. According to transparency international 89% of people in India think that corruption is a big problem and 39% have paid bribes in the last 12 months to civil servants. India has the highest rate of bribery in South Asia and is corrupt to its very core. Political parties, military, Bureaucracy, police and you can name anyone as every department (private and public) is rotten with corruption.