Osman Samiuddin pays tribute to the arch-diplomat who oversaw the best of times at the PCB
Osman Samiuddin24-Mar-2024One way to reflect on Shaharyar Khan’s legacy in his two stints as chairman PCB is to digest the period in between, when he wasn’t chairman. It began with a doping scandal in late 2006; swiftly escalated to the death of their coach, which, for a time, was treated as suspicious with his own side among the suspects; plummeted with a terrorist attack on a touring team in 2009 which took the game away from Pakistan; it ended a few years later with the clownish toing and froing between Zaka Ashraf and Najam Sethi (no, not last year’s japes but those from 2013-14).In other words, the time in between was the worst of times and that was it, there were no other times.Either side, in two three-year phases of Khan, Pakistan cricket was a more serene place, a place that made more sense. And I’ll be damned if his naturally avuncular demeanour didn’t make the place seem safer, more nurturing and wholesome. And let’s not forget, a place of results. Pakistan were arguably the second-best Test side in the world for a brief period in 2005-06; they were officially the number one Test side in the world in 2016.At least that is how it seems right now, in the immediate aftermath of his passing. It’s probably too simplistic a perspective, mired in the impulse to seek out and credit 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 benefitted from a team of seasoned officials around him. On-field results were the results of on-field actors. The politics of the game, but also of the country, when he operated were more stable.Plus, he was hardly a strongman by nature. Indeed, one of his strengths was that he was able to work with strong executive personnel, whether it was Ramiz Raja, Saleem Altaf or Sethi. A genuine strongman would never have tolerated power residing anywhere else but within him.Inzamam-ul-Haq and Shaharyar Khan at a press conference•Getty ImagesSo, simplistic yes. But not misplaced because the bottom line is, he did preside over two periods this century which now, over six years after his last tenure ended, live in the mind undeniably like some good ol’ days.He was the kind of man – refined, gentle, erudite, careful with his words – about whom we might sigh that they don’t make them like that anymore. We might, were it not such a truism: it is precisely how time works, that as each day passes the world changes, and as it changes, the men it makes must necessarily be different and not like they used to be.Consequently, they don’t make cricket administrators like that anymore either. His love for the game was that of an older generation’s. Pristine white kits, red ball, high-elbow cover-driving, the spirit of cricket, gentlemen all round, cricket as a thing of manners.But there’s no room for romanticism in diplomacy so, for instance, although he didn’t much care for the shortest format, he knew it was the coming thing and was not one to stand in the way of progress. When the time came for Pakistan to jump in, in 2005, he didn’t hold back, enabling the birth of the suitably razzmatazz ABN-AMRO Twenty20 Cup. Back in the day, pre-IPL, it was one of the great T20 events.That’s what was beneath the cuddly old-man exterior, the hard-nosed pragmatism. He was a democrat but worked as chairman of an ad-hoc board in his first stint under the military dictatorship of the late Pervez Musharraf. He was fully committed to drawing up a long-delayed constitution for the PCB. But despite being unable to do so ultimately, he didn’t let the pursuit paralyse him from actually getting stuff done.When he returned to the PCB in 2014, he did so to a new global order run by the Big Three. He publicly opposed it but accepted that his board had signed up for it (before he took charge) and would be faithful to it. Until Shashank Manohar came along and an opportunity arose to dismantle it.He was in his element in those boardrooms of the ICC, mingling with and mediating between contemporaries from across the world, on matters that mattered. This was, after all, one of the brighter lights of his country’s foreign service, a man who had been a UN representative in Rwanda post-genocide, and written a book about it – one of six he authored. When Shaharyar Khan made a case for international cricket to return to Pakistan, people couldn’t help but listen. Dealing with player tantrums, such as the one Younis Khan once threw on the other hand, could hardly have engaged him the same way. Perhaps this perspective is why he never clung to the board job like so many of his predecessors and successors. Life, he understood, was more.Related
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Still, sometimes you wished he would have been more autocratic. In curbing the power Inzamam ul Haq accrued as captain in his first stint for example. Or being more forceful in the moments that led up to the Oval Test forfeit (It’s remarkable, by the way, to think that the culmination of that forfeit and Younis’s resignation is what compelled him to leave that first stint in late 2006. These days that constitutes a few funny tweets and memes, and that’s it.) Or in asserting greater authority over Sethi in his second stint, when the administration in Pakistan was being pulled in two different directions.But these are minor quibbles really, because ultimately, only a wariness to recency bias prevents him from being remembered as one of Pakistan’s finest cricket heads. Were AH Kardar and Nur Khan (both, incidentally, archetypal strongmen) more transformative? Maybe, though the counter as you pick through Khan’s tenures – the introduction of T20s in Pakistan and central contracts for players (now reaching down to a pool of 70 U19 female cricketers), the return of international cricket, the launch of the PSL – is that we’re not nearly done weighing the effects of the transformations wrought under his leadership.