Ian Chappell: I see [faint smirk?] youve got your [suppressing a snort?] tiger on again. You want em to play like cornered tigers? Imran Khan: Yes, thats the motto recently, and its done a great job… If they play like tigers I dont mind if they win or lose today. The MCG was stacked high with 87,182 Melburnians. Mushtaq, wanting to make a good impression, applied gel to his hair for the first time in his life. Waz swallowed a sleeping pill the night before. He woke at ten refreshed… just floating. Pakistans 249, batting first, was a mysterious stop-start affair but thanks to Mushy and to Waz it was ample. Bowling off six flailing steps, Mushtaq skidded a wrongun through the chasm in Graeme Hicks consciousness. Akram bowled Allan Lamb and Chris Lewis with consecutive late-swinging blurs - a couple of bananas up the tailpipe of the England innings. What old Imran loved most was the opportunity to enter peoples imaginations. It was he whod soaked the team bus airwaves in a religious cassette praising Allah on the way to the ground; whod slaked some no-ball and wide worries Waz was having by convincing him simply to bound in, be free; whod horseshoed into Mushtaqs head a feeling of unclouded certainty that getting Hick out was his job and his destiny. That was at the team meeting beforehand. In that meeting, Imran pointed to his t-shirt. Later during the break between innings, the post-249 lull, he told everyone, Dont forget, we fight like cornered tigers… And they hugged. It was in these slippery footholds that Imran was a great leader, the footholds between whats real and make-believe, between cricket being a thrustingly important human endeavour and a thing of ridiculousness - slippery, and the exact same footholds in which cricket exists at all.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 09:55:03 +0000
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