How Many Times Won World Cup Pakistan – Rocky Road high: Imran and Co enjoy narrow World Cup win after beating England in Melbourne final
Twenty-two years after Pakistan’s greatest triumph, it’s still hard to believe how this scrappy team rose to glory
How Many Times Won World Cup Pakistan
By most standards, he got it too late, but from Pakistan, Imran Khan probably got the timing right. When his team arrived in Perth to face Australia in the 1992 World Cup, they had won just one of their first five games and were, as one player put it, the living dead. Imran, never one of the best communicators in life, became increasingly distant during the tournament; a chronic shoulder injury prevented his physical involvement, and his cancer hospital project was the main motivation in his life off the field.
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He led in a crippled body – in some exercises he was as fierce as he had ever been – but in spirit and soul he was absent. “I think there is a huge communication problem in the team at the moment,” Wasim Akram said at the time (as covered in Wasim and Waqar: Imran’s Inheritors by John Crace). “For example, Imran was telling me that we still have a chance and all the guys stopped and when we left they were asking me what he was saying… like the team is afraid of Imran.
Nor was he a speaker, though at least he had the baritone for it. But now, in Perth, he gathered his men in the pre-match dressing room, wearing a white tiger shirt, ready to pounce. Something about the horrible circumstances woke him up. “Maybe he thought I couldn’t be humiliated like that, that I couldn’t go that low in life, that God wouldn’t let me fall that low,” recalls Aaqib Javed, who during a tournament where Pakistan ran amok, was a stable center of gravity in his bowling attack. “So after that, with so much garbage around us, we can only win. There’s nothing else left for us. I don’t know where he got that feeling from, I really don’t know, but he came into the dressing room. He came in a short-sleeved shirt. Maybe he just thought we’d give it one last try.”
Light, colour, action: The 1992 World Cup saluted the ghost of the late Kerry Packer, the man who brightened ODI cricket © Getty Images
I probably wouldn’t have been able to say that at another time or on demand. There was a moment, a feeling arose in him; not speech that could be repeated or repeated over and over so that there was a risk of dilution. It had to come then, both too late and just right.
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Imran spoke to each player and told them to look at themselves and understand that they are the best players in the world. “You,” he asked one, “is there a more talented actor in the world than you?” Is there a better player than you, he asked another, a better batsman than you? After waking up each player, twenty minutes later he ended up with a picture on his shirt, the picture that resonated most with him and how he saw himself; tiger, pathan tiger, hunting, fighting, survival.
Now he has sparked a turnaround that has carried him through his toughest professional years, when a shin injury threatened to end his career. Fight like a cornered tiger, he told them, for nothing is more dangerous than a cornered tiger.
That aside, the actual content of what he said wasn’t all that unique or important. It was standard, consistent motivational material. But the most important thing, Aaqib explains, was who said it. “Whatever he said, it depends. The message is the same. If Imran Khan says this, if he comes on TV and says so and so, he will be the greatest all-rounder in the world, that’s one thing, if someone else says it, say Sarfraz Nawaz , who will like this?”
Nine teams and officials pose for photographs on board the ship in Sydney Harbor © Getty Images
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Imran told them that he knows, not only thinks but knows and believes that Pakistan will win the World Cup. “I know we’re going to win.” What he did was instill his confidence in the rest of the team, a feat that doesn’t just happen. This feat was the accumulation of a career, of a life, of every single day of success, of unchallenged power, every time he automatically returned to the captaincy, every time he refused to play when it was too hot or against a side too weak. It was the cumulative effect of Imran’s decades as a centurion, hero and icon condensed into a single speech.
The impact was greatest on younger players like Aaqib and Mushtaq Ahmed, who grew up worshiping Imran and were now his Svengali disciples. Others were less active. Javed Miandad does not mention this in his biography. Another senior member of the group said it was just “normal shit, nothing special.” I can’t even remember what was actually said because Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s kaffi was blaring in the background the whole time. Some cannot remember where and when the meeting took place. One – Zahid Fazal – said there was no such meeting at all; Imran regularly wore the Tiger jersey in one-day finals, Fazal said, and the only time he mentioned it during the World Cup was during a televised chant and once on the morning of the final.
However, the fact remains that Pakistan’s heyday began on the very morning of the Australia match. “All I know is that after those 15 minutes when the game started, the way I entered the pitch, I’ve never had that feeling before and I’ve never had it since,” says Aaqib. “I felt like no one could match me or stop me. I won a big game by three runs because I just knew. I knew every ball was going to go exactly where I wanted it to go.
The fifth World Cup was very much in keeping with the modern ethos of sporting events: bigger, better and shinier than its predecessors. There were more teams, games, colors, spectators, rules and action. The layout was also decent, at least in almost two thirds. Twenty-five of the 39 matches were played in Australia, including the semi-finals and finals. Australia was the spiritual heartland because modern ODI cricket was born there, behind the renegade spirit of Kerry Packer.
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Colored clothes, white balls and reflectors; Packer revived the old funny game in the late 1970s, and while every Australian summer is the same combination of colour, sound, light and sport, the 1992 World Cup was the official international edition. Soon all international ODIs will be both color and action, played in colored kits, with white balls and increasingly under lights. In BSkyB and satellite TV came the latest accomplice, broadcasting 24/7 to Australia and the lucrative underworld that had just opened its eyes to the riches of economic liberalism.
Everything about him seemed new. The deal boldly reversed the traditional division and instead required the nine teams to play each other at least once in a league format: fairer than it was hard to imagine. South Africa has returned to the cricket team again following a decision made in Sharjah four months before the start of the tournament. Their entry is a reflection of the country’s resurgence in the world (during the tournament a referendum was held in South Africa on whether President FW de Klerk should continue with reforms towards a multiracial government). Their performance was just as important on the field as it was off it.
The situation was typical of the opposition Pakistan: once he came early to be better prepared, but that eagerness turned into a curse.
It was a feeling of liberation, as a result of a great cultural revolution, where everyone hangs on the loose. The fast bowlers had two white balls to attack, one at either end. The batsmen had just two wickets to avoid outside the circle in the first 15 overs in search of a boundary. Fielders, locked in circles, began to let themselves go.
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In a rare stroke of common sense, Pakistan came into the tournament three weeks early to adjust to the conditions. Over the last half-decade, Pakistan have emerged as a formidable ODI side, especially in certain conditions. In Sharjah, they won five tournaments in a row in three years. The hosts have won five of the last seven bilateral ODI series since 1987. By the end of 1989, they had effectively won India’s mini World Cup, the Nehru Trophy, which featured every Test team except New Zealand. In the five years leading up to this World Cup, they were undisputedly the second best