When Marx alluded to religion as the opium of the people, the game of cricket was largely limited to the British nobility.

Until then it had not plagued the masses, else he would not have left this addictive bourgeois sport without his slashing critique in “The Capital”, his larger-than-life book with multiple volumes.

Being a psychologist, Frantz Fanon alluded to the plague left behind by the colonial powers, an Oedipus situation the colonized gleefully embraces and akin to the Stockholm syndrome tries not to grow out of it.

“Imperialism,” he says, “leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

Capitalism itself is the germ of rot, and whenever it touches anything, it turns it into progress and decadence, enthusiasm and indifference, pleasure and escape from the bitter reality haunting the people.

While Palestine is going through the live streaming of its genocide, Bolivia has successfully overturned another military coup— the second in the last five years when US-backed civil-military industrial complex removed Evo Morales a popularly elected socialist president— and Julian Assange finding his freedom from the clutches of the striptease of Western democracy and freedom, cricket is a non-issue. Yet cricket has seized upon the imagination of the people, especially of the subcontinent, leaving existential issues on the back burner.

The enthusiasts have left their horrible miseries in oblivion. The country is sweltering in sizzling heat with incredible power outages.

Expropriation by the capitalist class, high inflation, and massive unemployment are rampant yet cricket paranoia has obsessed the middle class sliding down to the level of subaltern.

“If the psychic energies of the average mass of people,” Wilhelm Reich says, “watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible”.

All games, including cricket, have become a source of catharsis, a means to forget suffering even when they are staring into one’s eyes. “It is helplessness,” Adorno says. “It is flight; not…a flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance…. Sport has become a frivolous activity which reinforces the capitalist system”.

Mimicking fascism it becomes a cross-class phenomenon that assimilates the oppressor and the oppressed, the expropriator and the expropriated, a theocrat and an atheist.

Long ago, people thought that even thieves had a conscience, and they retained some ethics and morality. In those days cricket was considered a gentlemen’s game, if a batsman (now batter) edged to the keeper he invariably left the crease without looking at the umpire.

The tradition was last observed in the Sydney test of 1976-77 when Majid Khan bewildered the crowd, the opposing team, and the umpires, as he left the ground when his bat found a faint edge that even eluded the Australian umpires.

He received a standing ovation from the Australian crowd as he returned to the pavilion. Such gestures of honesty are not seen in real life, and cricket is no exception.

Later, the Australian team took the sheen from the sport when its fielders made a habit of sledging, bullying, and intimidating the opposing batsmen. They learned the art from their mentors, the British masters.

During the 1932-33 series Douglas Jardine, the English captain asked Larwood and Voce, his two pacers, to target the Australian batsmen, especially the legendary Bradman, by attacking their leg stumps bowling shot pitch deliveries with most of the fielders standing on the leg-side.

To defend their bodies, the Aussie batsmen fended off the pacers to give easy catches to the legside fielders. This was called “body line bowling”. England won the series but lost the grace if it had any. Its former colonies suffering from its atrocious crimes will certainly deny this honour to the dying monarchical state.

It was the intermission between the First and the Second World Wars whose preparations were underway. Capitalism was ripe and had already developed into imperialism, and the sport too had metamorphosed into a commodity.

It was no longer a play, an enjoyment, a momentary freedom, but as Adorno says instead of remaining faithful to the dream of freedom by continuing to stay independent of any purpose, it became a duty in the shape of competition losing the sense of freedom. Victory and financial gains, though not many at that time became the real motives.

With the expansion of capitalism first soccer and then cricket became the immediate victims of the exchange society.

The test matches that determine the technique, tactics, patience, and insightfulness to play for five days have lost their importance. The test tube cricket of fifty overs and later twenty overs deprived the sport of its glamour and even dignity. The IPL, IPP, and similar formats have made the cricketers filthy rich but undignified.

The concept of nationhood, itself a capitalist concept has become ambiguous because the players prefer playing Leagues over the national duty. The Indian Leagues offer huge sums of money that have lured many fascinating cricketers to leave test cricket prematurely.

Akin to the Pakistani state, the Pakistani cricket team has always been a hostage to the civil-military bureaucracy.

From Hafeez Kardar onwards every head of the cricketing board has played catastrophic roles in destroying Pakistani cricket. They are arrogant, feudal-minded, and barring Kardar incompetent people yet they think of themselves as Minerva, the absolute wisdom of Hegel.

Under their aegis, Pakistan has become a lowly-ranked side. The players’ ability is less than average, they are religious bigots, extremely unfit, and always prepared to slit the throat of their teammates. Lacking a pool of players is a dilemma that Ramiz Raja rightly indicated.

No Messi was sitting on the bench he stated, even the bowling department, which had always been the pride of Pakistan until the recent past, is completely emaciated, not a shadow of Wasim or Waqar, or even the raw pace of Shoaib Akhtar is in sight.

Grouping in the team and batting had always been the Achilles’ heel of Pakistani cricket. Even in the golden days of the batting period when the greats like Zaheer, Javed, Imran, Asif, Mushtaq Mohd, and Wasim Raja were ruling the roost the team’s batting often collapsed like ninepins.

The grouping began in 1962 much before the series against England even started. A young Javed Burki, a son of a general, was preferred over highly deserving candidates of captaincy such as Imtiaz Ahmed, Hanif Mohd, Saeed Ahmed, Alimuddin, Mahmood Hussain, and Fazal Mahmood, the latter was brought out of retirement. Pakistan lost the series 4-0.

The clash of the 1990s between Wasim and Waqar was an open secret. What can one expect from the Lilliputians of the present era who demand money without grace and grab it without thanks, while attributing their dismal performances to the will of God? “Not a few who sought to cast out their devil,” Nietzsche says, “entered into the swine themselves”.

Pakistan, a laboratory of fundamentalism where religious bigotry pervades has created an alienated, shallow, and insolent mass of youngsters.

The fault cannot be entirely theirs, for human beings are an ensemble of social relations. They are the product of a decadent, regressive economic system, which has created paratroopers of religious fascism who are not only spiritually destroyed but also morally disoriented by the drab and draconian everyday existence. They lynch other humans mercilessly because their minds have already been lynched by the imbecile ruling class. Lest one forgets the inhabitants of a country heading to meet the destiny of Somalia and Sudan cannot behave otherwise.

For people akin to these one needs no psychoanalysis because “psychoanalysis” Freud says, “demands a degree of honesty which is unusual in a bourgeois society”. “At this point, the ethics based on religion” he adds “promise a better life.

But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth, ethics will be preached in vain…. It is quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be more helpful in this direction than any ethical commands“.

Freud, an apostle of capitalism, was not seeking socialism as an alternative, on the contrary, while writing its critique he found an equal distribution of wealth as the only way out for a decent living. If everything continues to be rotten in the state of Denmark, the growth of fanatic Macbeths cannot be stopped nor the downhill slide of cricket.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024