Renaissance of Cricket

One swallow doesn’t make a summer but to beat England’s touring cricket team recently and clinch the test series which is ranked among the top three or four teams in the cricket world today was certainly no mean achievement. It is going to boost up the sagging morale of our boys who had not tasted victory for quite sometime now.
Time was when our team had been blessed with captain like Abdul Hafeez Kardar who was respected and feared by the team players at the same time. He was an average all rounder but was a strict disciplinarian who brooked no nonsense on the field, in the dressing room as well in the hotels where his boys used to stay while on foreign tours. It was he under whose stewardship we beat almost all the leading cricket teams of the world on their home grounds and thus established our identity in the cricket world.  Only test matches used to be played then. Another notable feature of yester years was that every skipper used to pen a book at the conclusion of foreign tour in which noteworthy incidents on the field and in the pavilion were faithfully recorded. One remembers Kardar’s wonderful book billed as Under the green canopy written by him after the visit of our team to West Indies back in 1957 in which he recorded very interesting happenings on the ground.
Those were the days when TV hadn’t arrived in this country and it was the duo of Omar Qureshi and Jamshed Marker who broadcast running commentary of test matches on Radio Pakistan. It was a treat to listen to their commentary and many persons of our generation learnt the art of speaking correct and grammatical English by listening to them . Jamshed Marker later on joined the Foreign office and served as our ambassador in many countries. He also wrote a book captioned Memoirs of a diplomat. Omer Qureshi used to write a sports column in English dailies as long as he lived. The likes of these two broadcasters weren’t heard by us since long.