I will tell my team to be fearless: Aaqib Javed

February 28, 2015 02:17 am | Updated 02:17 am IST - Perth:

Aqib Javed.

Aqib Javed.

Perth, says Aaqib Javed, was where it all turned around in 1992.

Pakistan had won only one of its first five matches in the World Cup and was preparing to face Australia at the WACA, a fortress if there ever was one. “I still remember Imran coming to us wearing a shirt with a tiger on it. We were sitting around wondering when our flight back home was. Within half an hour he had convinced everyone that this flight was going to Melbourne and not to Pakistan,” he said.

Javed took three for 21 that day as Pakistan embarked on a run of five straight victories that included the final. “We changed here,” he said, pointing to the ground. “We came here broken and turned it around. I have great memories of this place.”

On Saturday, Javed returns to the WACA as coach, knowing that his UAE team is leagues behind India. “My team is probably thinking — this is India, the world champion, what will we do? But I will talk to them now for five minutes and they should go: ‘Oh, we hadn’t thought this way at all’. This is what leadership should do.”

Javed hopes to weave just the kind of magic that Imran Khan wove with his words back in 1992. “Can you imagine today, in a final, a captain wearing a T-shirt with a tiger printed on it to the toss?” he gushed.

“Someone listens to you only when you show honesty, bravery and hard work. Imran had all three qualities. What a person was saying was not as important as who was saying it. You need to have faith that the man who’s saying this is speaking the truth. Imran was Imran because of these things.”

Improved team

Javed took over as coach of the UAE in 2012, and has since built a vastly improved team, taking a consistent group of players to the World Cup. “You need a plan. If you change your players every other day, it’s not going to work. Look at Pakistan — they don't know what their strength is, what their final XI is. I knew what my batting order was three months ago,” he said. At this World Cup, the UAE has run both its opponents close and could quite easily have beaten Ireland. “We’ve got four games left. That will decide where we want to go. When we do well against teams, they will be willing to play against us. We need to compete against them and give them a hard time.”

The UAE squad may be reliant on imports now, but Javed believes good results will draw more native players to the sport. “Why will a local boy support his team when it’s not doing well? Now the locals want to watch India and Pakistan. I’ll take you back 25 years, when we used to play against Bangladesh. People there used to carry posters of us to the ground. This is a process.”

Back in Javed’s day, Pakistan had the wood over its neighbour, his seven for 37 in the final of the 1991 Wills Trophy in Sharjah emblematic of an era of Indian disappointment. Things have changed considerably now and the latest defeat has left Javed exasperated.

“Pakistan is now making the same mistakes that India used to: let’s add another batsman because our bowling is weak,” he said.

“With all the new ODI rules, you need to have five genuine bowlers who can take wickets. Look at India, they go with five bowlers. There was a time when they used to go with three full-time bowlers against us. We were thinking: ‘Arre yaar, why don’t these guys understand? Even if they field 10 batsmen they can’t make 250’.”

Javed hopes that at the WACA on Saturday, some of his own success against India will rub off on his team. “I will tell my bowlers not to worry about who’s batting,” he said. “I will tell them to be fearless.”

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