Goodbye Inzi

I haven’t had a chance to write anything on the cricket lately, but I watched most of the last day’s play at Lahore today, and I have some thoughts to share.  The eventual result of the match (a commendably earned draw which handed SA a 1-0 series win) didn’t quite go in Pakistan’s favor completely, but the richely deserved tributes handed out to Inzamam at the end of the match in some way helped one momentarily forget Pakistan’s shortcomings in this series, and celebrate one man and his enormous contribution to Pakistan Cricket.

There’s few people who might argue that selecting an out of form batsman for series deciding test to allow him one last hurrah at the international level was keeping the interests of the individual ahead of the team’s. But that would be an extremely selfish argument. Pakistan Cricket has a poor history of mistreating its greats, leaving them in the lurch at the fag ends of their careers. 

From Saeed Anwer, to Wasim Akram, to Waqar Younus, you’d think that between these four players that pretty much formed the pillars of Pakistan Cricket in the last two decades, at least one of them would have been given the chance to have a graceful exit from the world stage.

But no, always it came down to being dropped after a poor World Cup, and then a sobbering, emotional retirement-announcing-press confrence few months later, they’d be gone. The warm exit Inzi recieved today hence is a welcome, refreshing change that should appreicated and encouraged rather than be condemned.

When you have given 120 tests and over 8000 runs to your country, you deserve at least one final honorable test in return. There’s few people who disagree on Inzamam’s stature as one of the best, if not the best outright, batsman to have originated from Pakistan. He finished two runs behind Jawed Miandad as Pakistan’s 2nd highest test run getter of all time and with Mohammad Yousuf perhaps at the twilight of his own career right now and several years of cricket still left in him, it may not be unlikely that the two national test records that Inzi does hold at the time (most test centuries and most centuries in a winning cause) may be taken away from him too.

But like with all true legends of the game, you can’t guage the impact they have had by looking at records and statistics.  For numbers give you an arbitrary view of things. They tell you that Inzi never scored a 100 against South Africa and that he only averages about 31 against Australia, frequently two of the best bowling attacks through out Inzi’s 15 year career. But unless you look closely, they don’t tell you how he also scored an absolutely glorious 92 not out earlier this year at Port Elizabeth, which Osman Samiuddin described as ‘the best hundred that Inzi never got’. They don’t tell you about about a cool 58 not out while batting with No. 11 Mushtaq Ahmed against Australia in 1994 in a classic test in Karachi.

They tell you how he has been run out more then most of the other players of his era, but they don’t tell you how these very run outs carved the very sporting charachter that we associate with him, a character whose lazy-greatness meant he scored enough boundaries to almost consider running un-neccessary. No one, in my opinion, describes the nature of Inzi’s running better then his 1992 World Cup winning team mate Rameez Raja; ‘Its not that he doesn’t know how to run, its just that he doesn’t want to run’ he frequently says while commentating on television. Implying, in effect, that when he really wants to run, he isn’t exactly a slouch.

That’s why you have to look much deeper beyond just numbers to guage Inzi’s contribution to Pakistan and indeed world cricket. And that’s why his place in the annal’s of cricket history is immortal, it can’t be overtaken by the breaking of any records, by the imergence of any other players, or by anything at all. They’ll never be another Inzi and we’ll always remember the one that graced world cricket for all these years.

For all the tragedo-comic run outs, the match winning centuries, the mouth-opening sixes against happless spinners, the modest presentation ceremony quotes, the changing hairstyles and amusingly enduring physique, for all these memories and more, Pakistan Cricket and its fans will always remain deeply indebted to this giant of a man. Thank you Inzamam, thank you Inzi, may God bless you always and all the best for your future.

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