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In many ways, Misbah-ul-Haq is the antitheses of your typical Pakistani cricketer. The same system that hands Test caps to 14-year-olds (forget the authenticity of those birth certificates for the moment) and picks talented players off the streets, also allows a man to play Test cricket in his forties. Seen alongside a generation of players that wouldn't mind compromising on a high-school education for a career in cricket, Misbah stands out with his MBA degree.
It is his longevity in the game, however, that fascinates the most, and that he was able to call time on his Test career on his own terms rather than be edged out. Even at 42, Pakistan cricket was still not willing to let him go, nor Younis Khan, who timed his retirement to coincide with Misbah’s. But everyone knew they had to shrug their shoulders and accept that their retirement was just a matter of time, whether together, or in phases.
Let’s stick, though, to the aura of Misbah.
In the mercurial world of Pakistan cricket, Misbah is a player and personality cut from a different cloth. Phlegmatic. Reluctant celebrity. Relying more on logic than instinct in his captaincy. A late bloomer. For Misbah, a serious career in cricket was a reality only at 24, when he made his first-class debut. His stubbornly cautious approach to batting earned him the nickname tuk-tuk — just as demeaning as “The Wall” was for Rahul Dravid — but he also had the ability to switch from first gear to fifth and back, peppering the stands with sixes after a spell of attritional batting. He would be like the quiet one at the party who dramatically perks up when his favourite song plays, belts out the lyrics and air-guitars his way to glory like no one’s watching (everyone is), before retreating to his shell after the song ends.
This unpredictable side to Misbah’s batting is typically Pakistani though. The most technically correct batsman in the side can also serve up the odd reverse sweep and paddle scoop, even when a world title is at stake. He is remembered as much for his tragicomic dismissals than “boring” fifties. Opposition captains sometimes can never tell what’s coming — get on YouTube and watch the video of him making a fool out of slip fielder Alastair Cook by first premeditating a sweep before changing his shot, sending him and the keeper haring off in the opposite direction.
Misbah’s career path itself has switched directions more than once. Till he was 24, he wasn't even sure if he wanted to play cricket for a living. To understand his dilemma, you would have to go back to his roots.
Hailing from Mianwali, a small town on the western fringes of Punjab, bordering Balochistan, Misbah was brought up in an environment that didn't encourage serious cricket. Proper cricketing facilities were literally many miles away and hence recreation for kids of his generation meant the simpler world of tape-ball cricket. Misbah was active on the tape-ball circuit, often traveling to matches in nearby towns in Punjab by train. Even back then, he had the reputation of being the “steady batsman”, preserving his wicket in order to see his side through, in a format that frowns upon dot balls and singles. His improvisational skills were honed in these fields.
But his parents were never going to let him abandon studies for cricket during his teens so he was off to Faisalabad for college and later to Lahore for his MBA, while still playing active tape-ball cricket on the side. He could have settled into an academic career like his parents, or one in the corporate world, but in 1998, he chose to further his cricket instead.
His education, he recalled later, was to have a profound impact on his captaincy and batting. "Having an education, or just having a background of reasoning, makes you think logically,” he told The Cricket Monthly last year. “Everything is about logic, whether that is batting or anything else. There is an evaluation process to everything: that if I do A or B here then C will happen. As long as you don't have the habit of thinking logically then you rely solely on talent and you just play every ball without context.”
He never had the crowd-pulling qualities of Shahid Afridi but Misbah always gave the impression of being comfortable in his own skin, backing himself and his tactics.
He got better as a batsman in red-ball cricket and within three years from his first-class debut, he had played his first Test. It was a rocky beginning for Misbah and over the next few years, he found himself in and out of the side. Again, when he had thoughts of leaving cricket, the game came calling for another chance. At 33, he found his mojo again during the 2007 World T20 but his age made him dispensable. After a mixed three years following his comeback, he was dropped again, this time for the England tour in 2010. In a rare emotional outburst, Misbah said he felt like “burning his kit” when he learned that he wasn’t even in the provisional squad. Again, he felt like quitting.
But a quirk of fate handed him another chance and there was no looking back. The spot-fixing scandal of 2010 left Pakistan cricket in its worst crisis and the Pakistan Cricket Board knocked on Misbah’s door to steer the team through a new, challenging era. The cult of Misbah started taking shape. Having lost two talented fast bowlers to spot-fixing, Misbah played to Pakistan’s strength — spin. This was a deviation from the characteristic approach of attacking with pace. Misbah wasn't afraid to open the bowling with spin. In order to gain back self-respect, Pakistan’s approach was to not lose, even if it came with the tag of being “boring”. The wins started coming, most notable being the 3-0 sweep of England in 2012, with Saeed Ajmal and Co reducing the new No.1 Test team to a trainwreck.
Misbah had successfully led Pakistan into an era of redemption, with the fans coining popular the hashtag “#TeamMisbah”. Pakistan were still not a world-beating side in all formats, but in their adopted home of the UAE, they were tough opponents. But given Pakistan’s history of knee-jerk changes in captaincy following every poor performance, would the #TeamMisbah bubble burst?
It did, although partially when he lost the T20 captaincy to Mohammad Hafeez in 2012, something he wasn't too pleased about but accepted. It was similar to the manner in which Pakistan fans viewed him. He never had the crowd-pulling qualities of Shahid Afridi but Misbah always gave the impression of being comfortable in his own skin, backing himself and his tactics.
Expressing emotion is hardly a Misbah trait. Ask him a question at a press conference and he duly answers, in his deadpan manner in a tone that never varies, staring at the wall behind you. Although he fields the hard questions with dignity, you aren't convinced he has spoken his mind. You are most likely to catch his eye in a more informal setting, like I experienced at a hotel lobby in Galle in 2012. A nod and a smile and he was off for a meeting. In one-on-one interviews he appears to have opened up more, speaking about how the fans’ reaction to his “slow” batting in the 2011 World Cup semi-final against India irked him.
It was perhaps Misbah’s fortune that he never captained Pakistan at home, escaping the attendant pressure and stress from supporters and local media. It coincided with his best phase as a batsman. In 56 Tests since September 2010, he has an average of over 51. Till December 2009, he averaged 35.60 in 18 Tests. He went on to become Pakistan’s most successful Test captain, surpassing Imran Khan’s record of 14 wins.
What those captaincy numbers don’t reveal are his other invaluable contributions, like keeping the team as a cohesive unit and in good spirits in their adopted in the UAE, and in managing his spin resources during Ajmal’s ban and his underwhelming return with a remodelled bowling action. Misbah’s calm presence also eased the return of Mohammad Amir (of spot-fixing shame) after serving his ban, after initial protests from Hafeez and Azhar Ali that they would never play in the same team with a convicted “cheat”.
The question about retirement grew with every passing year, but fans couldn't deny that Pakistan cricket needed him more, and that his absence would create a huge void. His dwindling batting form following the England tour in 2016 was a sign that his time was probably up, that Team-Misbah had a shelf life.
His quitting the one-day game was a sign that he wanted to phase out his own retirement. The indications were fairly strong that the 2016-17 tour of Australia would be his farewell series. Pakistan looked woefully out of depth and so did he as a batsman and captain. His dismissal in the third Test in Sydney — what many thought would be his final Test innings — caught off a top edge, summed up a horror of a tour. But Misbah didn’t want it to end this way and Pakistan cricket still looked unwilling to show him the door.
Did Misbah have enough of a threshold to wait another three months for Pakistan’s next Test series? He did, and this time he ended all uncertainty by declaring that the West Indies tour would be his last. There was still room for Misbah Tragicomedy — he was stranded on 99 in Jamaica, and in the next Test, he was on the same score but botched it by getting out caught. In the third Test, Pakistan gave their two retiring heroes a series win at the last possible minute, thanks to a brain-fade by West Indies’ No. 11 with one over to go in the match. This was the farewell Misbah wanted, though he would have loved to have been paraded around the field in Lahore rather than Dominica. There was no need to call it off at Sydney after all.
The retirements of Younis and Misbah marks the passing of an era in Pakistan cricket. While Younis had a more volatile relationship with Pakistan cricket fans and administration, Misbah’s relatively deadpan image made him difficult to decipher. More than his skills, Pakistan needed his shrewd cricketing brain to weather crisis after crisis. A calm head to bridge over troubled waters. They embraced him because he was, simply, different.
