When the world counted to 10

In the well-oiled machine called the Hollywood Sports Underdog movie, the push-up sequence is one of those invaluable set pieces that oil the wheels of the story. We see the athlete in the middle of rigorous training sessions, generally accompanied by a reinvigorated, has-been maverick for a coach (add life-ruins according to taste), running the long yards, pushing his/her mind and body to the breaking point. The push-up is the elementary particle of this nucleus of uber-masculine aggression. With every successive push-up, fresh furrows appear on our hero’s sweaty forehead. He grows ever more determined to leap tall buildings with a single bound on the field. But the push-up itself is always just the entrée, never the main event. Luckily, nobody told Misbah-ul-Haq.

Captaining a side of famously bad tourists, Misbah found himself waging a lonely war against England’s quicks on the first day of the recently concluded four-match series, at Lord’s. No other Pakistani batsman seemed half as likely to make a substantial contribution. Misbah ducked, weaved, left and left and left, and stepped out occasionally to smash the spinners over the infield: Moeen Ali got the worst of Misbah’s sweeping spree. Before long, Pakistan had battled to a respectable position and Misbah completed one of the more remarkable Test centuries of recent times. And then came the moment which grabbed the headlines around the world: the captain saluting, a tribute to the Pakistani armed forces, and then following it up with a set of ten push-ups. Some of the English players, including their generally unruffled captain, Alastair Cook, were less than impressed.

To the uninitiated, here’s the immediate reason behind Misbah’s gesture: at a little over 42, he is the oldest current Test cricketer. He leads a team that has historically been among the most physically unfit outfits on the planet. For these reasons, the skipper has copped a fair bit of criticism from commentators and fans. Before the tour to England began, Misbah and the team went on a military-style boot camp, where team bonding, stamina and fitness building were emphasised. The hard work paid off and Misbah wasn’t going to be quiet about it.

Crucially, he made it clear (in an AFP interview) that the gesture wasn’t aimed at the opposition, merely a shout-out for the people who had helped him achieve peak fitness. Soon, Azhar Ali followed suit after hitting a century of his own in the third Test: a quick look at his captain standing in the balcony, and off he went with the push-ups. Sohail Khan, who picked up five first-innings wickets in his first game in years, even did trick push-ups at the end of the day’s play, entertaining the crowd with his antics. You could have fried an egg on Jimmy Anderson’s head.

However, as long-time observers of the game will tell you, those 10 push-ups from Misbah were also a gesture of defiance against certain stereotypes that have crept into cricket coverage and analysis, through decades of lazy usage. Asian teams cannot play short-pitched fast bowling? Misbah stared down the greatest swing bowler in the game. Asian teams can only score runs in the subcontinent? Misbah ensured that Pakistan outscored England in the first innings, three out of four times. Asian teams are full of big-name, ageing batsmen who cannot run quick singles? Misbah, at 42, barely broke a sweat, batting for the entire day and still having enough in the tank for an even 10 push-ups.

Armchair analysts find it easy to characterise the success of Asian cricketers as an artistic triumph rather than a calculated, cold-blooded, train-for achievement. On the other hand, an Alastair Cook is seen as an automaton, an emotionless compiler of runs, guided by hard-nosed science rather than the mystical, unknowable wristwork of the Orient. It’s an easy binary to adopt: Asia as art and the West as science. But even if this were true in the times of Zaheer Abbas and David Gower (at their peak, both players viewed as ‘artists’ rather than what they were: elite athletes at the height of their physical prowess), it is no longer the case.

Virat Kohli has become the most-feared, limited-overs bully in the world, and that quantum shift in his performance levels has everything to do with his scarcely believable fitness, as he himself likes to point out. The sight of his Popeye forearms whiplashing perfectly serviceable balls to the fence drives bowlers to distraction these days. On the other hand, there is a little bit of mystique in the way Steven Smith, the most accomplished Aussie batsman today, uses his wrists to thread balls outside the off stump to midwicket. Misbah was just reminding us all that cricket has finally been transmogrified by globalisation: it’s just that some of us have spent a lot of time pretending otherwise.

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