Left field

Passionate crowds key to sport

This week’s attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team means Pakistan will be a no-go area for sports teams for years to come but the country will still be able to “host” matches elsewhere, with a “home” series already lined up against Australia in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

It’s a good solution for the Pakistan Cricket Board, who will keep the team playing and generate much needed cash from the sale of the TV broadcasting rights, but I hope this is not the start of a trend.

Great sporting events must take place where the crowds are there to watch them, even if TV revenue would still flow in for games played just for the cameras.

As I write this, Sweden are preparing to play their Davis Cup tennis tie against Israel behind closed doors, supposedly because they could not guarantee security should fans be allowed to actually turn up and watch the matches.

Meanwhile, columnists, bloggers and sports figures have been wondering out loud whether the events of this week mean athletes are now targets for extremists, 37 years on from the Munich Olympics, when the pro-Palestinian Black September group killed 11 members of the Israeli team.

“One argument that was used is that it was very unlikely cricketers would be targeted,” England captain Andrew Strauss said after the attack. “Clearly that has been proved wrong.”

A long winter looms for Pakistan cricket

A billion fans in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — all test nations — have used the game of cricket as a balm for their myriad problems.

That myth was exploded on Tuesday after gunmen wounded six Sri Lankan players after firing heavy weapons as their team bus wound its way towards the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore to start the third day’s play in the second test.

While the players apparently escaped without serious injuries, at least eight Pakistanis lost their lives and a local umpire was critically wounded.

Cricket will never be the same again in the region.

Sri Lanka’s tour had itself come in the shadow of violence after the Indian government, its bilateral relations with its neighbour nosediving after the deadly November militant attacks in Mumbai, refused permission for its team to tour Pakistan in January-February.

The island team stepped into the breach, with Pakistan desperate for test cricket and money, having gone over a year without five-day games.

Former skipper Inzamam-ul Haq betrayed the helplessness of cricket administrators in Pakistan, unable to believe that militants, to draw global attention, could have targeted their favourite game.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan under siege: cricket becomes a target

"Everything is officially going to hell." The verdict of a reader quoted by All Things Pakistan said perhaps better than anyone else why the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore marked a defining moment in Pakistan's agonising descent into chaos.

Six Sri Lankan cricketers and their British assistant coach were wounded when gunmen attacked their bus as it drove under police escort to the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore.  Five policemen were killed.

The death toll was small by South Asian standards.  But what defined it -- beyond the audacity and apparent sophistication of the attack -- was the assault on the identity of a country where cricket, as in neighbouring India, is a national obsession.

"An ambush targeting the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore earlier this morning has literally sent waves of disbelief and shock across Pakistan," said a post on Metroblogging Lahore. "Citizens of Lahore are specifically terrified at the extent of sophisticated weaponry used by terrorists in an incident that caused unprecedented damage to the country's image and its cricketing future."

"Why can't we ever just have a slow news day ... every day there's something new," complained another post on Twitter.

South Asia is no stranger to violence, from the days of partition onwards. But there seems to me to be something qualitatively quite different in what is going on now, in which brutality and the alienation of the local population is not so much incidental but central to the method.