Osman Samiuddin: Shaharyar Khan was the strong gentleman Pakistan cricket needed | Top Vip News

One way to reflect on Shaharyar Khan’s legacy in his two terms as PCB president is to digest the intervening period, when he was not president. He started with a doping scandal in late 2006; It quickly led to the death of his coach, who, for a time, was treated as a suspect among suspects on his own side. he went down with a terrorist attack on a touring team in 2009 that took the game away from Pakistan; he ended it a few years later with the clownish back and forth between Zaka Ashraf and Najam Sethi (no, not last year’s banter but the ones from 2013-14).

In other words, the intermediate time was the worst of times and that’s it, there were no other times.

Either way, in two phases of Khan’s three years, Pakistan cricket was a more serene place, a place that made more sense. And I’ll be damned if his naturally fatherly demeanor didn’t make the place seem safer, more welcoming, and healthier. And let’s not forget, a place of results. Pakistan were arguably the second best Test team in the world for a brief period in 2005-06; They were officially the world’s number one Test team in 2016.

At least that’s what it seems now, immediately after his passing. It is probably an overly simplistic view, mired in the impulse to seek out and give credit to the strongman, that individual authority who runs everything, be it an institution, a political party, a government or, in this case, a cricket board. He benefited from a team of experienced officials around him. The results in the field were the results of the actors in the field. The politics of the game, but also of the country, when he operated was more stable.

Furthermore, he was not a strong man by nature. In fact, one of his strengths was that he could work with strong executive personnel, whether it was Ramiz Raja, Saleem Altaf or Sethi. A true strong man would never have tolerated power residing anywhere other than him.

So, simplistic, yes. But it is not out of place because the bottom line is that he presided over two terms in this century that now, more than six years after he finished his last term, live in the mind unmistakably like some good old days.

He was the kind of man – refined, gentle, erudite, careful with his words – who we could sigh that they no longer do so. We could do it, if it were not a truism: this is precisely how time works, that as each day passes the world changes, and as it changes, the men it creates must necessarily be different and not as they used to be.

Consequently, they don’t make more cricket administrators like that either. His love for the game was that of an older generation. Spotless white uniforms, red ball, high-elbow driving, the spirit of cricket, gentlemen everywhere, cricket as a matter of good manners.

But there is no room for romanticism in diplomacy so, for example, although he didn’t care much for the shorter format, he knew it was what was coming and he wasn’t one to stand in the way of progress. When the time came for Pakistan to join, in 2005, they did not hold back, allowing the birth of the appropriately rowdy ABN-AMRO Twenty20 Cup. In the past, before the IPL, it was one of the big T20 events.

That’s what was underneath the tender old man’s exterior, the tough pragmatism. He was a Democrat but worked as chairman of an ad hoc board in his first term under the military dictatorship of the late Pervez Musharraf. He was fully committed to drafting a long-delayed constitution for the PCB. But despite not being able to do it in the end, he didn’t let the persecution paralyze him from getting things done.

When he returned to the PCB in 2014, he did so for the sake of a new global order led by the Big Three. He publicly objected, but accepted that his board had signed it (before he took office) and would be faithful to it. Until Shashank Manohar came along and the opportunity arose to dismantle it.

He was in his element in those ICC boardrooms, mingling and mediating among contemporaries from around the world, on issues that mattered. After all, this was one of the brightest lights of his country’s foreign service, a man who had been the UN representative in Rwanda after the genocide and had written a book about it, one of six he wrote. When Shaharyar Khan made the case for the return of international cricket to Pakistan, people couldn’t help but listen. Dealing with player tantrums, like the one Younis Khan once did, on the other hand, could hardly have involved him in the same way. Perhaps this perspective is the reason he never held on to the board position like many of his predecessors and successors. Life, he realized, was more.

Still, sometimes one wishes he had been more autocratic. To curb the power that Inzamam ul Haq amassed as captain in his first stint, for example. Or be more forceful in the moments leading up to the loss of the Oval Test (it’s notable, by the way, to think that the culmination of that loss and Younis’ resignation is what forced him out of that first spell at the end of 2006. These days that (makes for some funny tweets and memes, and that’s it.) Or by asserting greater authority over Sethi in his second term, when the administration in Pakistan was being pulled in two different directions.

But these are actually minor quibbles, because ultimately only a wariness of recency bias prevents him from being remembered as one of Pakistan’s greatest cricket bosses. Were AH Kardar and Nur Khan (both, by the way, archetypal strongmen) more transformative? Perhaps, although the counter in analyzing Khan’s mandates (the introduction of T20 in Pakistan and central contracts for players (now reaching a pool of 70 under-19 cricketers), the return of international cricket, the launch of the PSL) means that we have not yet finished weighing the effects of the transformations achieved under his leadership.