With the 1968-69 revolution of Pakistan in full swing against a draconian Gen Ayub Khan dictatorship, the Board of Cricket Control in Pakistan (BCCP, now the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB)) decided to invite England.

It was at a time when the England team were in protest themselves, after Apartheid-era South Africa refused to play against Basil D’Oliveira, the mixed-race South African-born cricketer who chose to play for England after he was not allowed to play for the country of his birth.

The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC, with England’s cricket affairs now run by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB)) decided on a tour of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India and Pakistan. However, the English decided to skip India after Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi refused to set aside £20,000 as a deposit for the tour, according to cricket legend Hanif Muhammad’s autobiography Playing for Pakistan.

News of the uprising in Pakistan had reached the MCC while they were in Sri Lanka and talks of abandoning the tour had already begun. Mark Peel, in his biography of former England captain Colin Cowdrey, The Last Roman, writes that, when the team landed in Karachi at the start of the tour on February 2, 1969, England manager Les Ames and Cowdrey were in discussions with the British deputy high commissioner and the BCCP to reorganise the tour.

The Karachi Test match between England and Pakistan in 1969 has the dubious distinction of being the first one ever to be called off due to rioting. The melee at the National Stadium saw clashes between spectators, anti-Gen Ayub protesters and the police, and led to the resignation of the military dictator

Since East Pakistan stood in complete revolt against Ayub, the BCCP decided to move matches scheduled in Chittagong and Dhaka to West Pakistan. This move turned out to be fiercely unpopular, and Dhaka was reinstated as the venue for the second Test.

On that decision, vice-captain Tom Graveney’s biographer Andrew Murtagh, writing in Touched by Greatness, quotes Graveney as saying that, “The only reason we went was that the students in Dacca [Dhaka], who had control of the city, threatened to burn down the British consulate if we didn’t come.”

Graveney recalled the army being out in force, buildings alight and gunfire across the cities they were in. Politics was the reason the South Africa tour was cancelled and, in the Pakistan tour, “…the team felt exposed and vulnerable, pawns in a wider political struggle.”

TENSIONS ON AND OFF THE PITCH

President Gen Ayub — also the patron of the BCCP — ever willing to wield the little power he had left, had the first two fixtures rescheduled as four-day affairs, with only the third Test in Karachi scheduled to be played across all five days. There was already the sense that rioters could enter the grounds, and for Ayub, fewer days would mean fewer chances of that.

While off-the-field tensions were high, the dynamic within Pakistan’s Test team did not fare much better either. Hanif Muhammad was unceremoniously removed from his role as captain after only being at the helm for 11 Tests, which included winning a Test series at home against New Zealand.

In his autobiography, Hanif Muhammad made note of the political climate as well. “The political climate in Pakistan wasn’t good either, what with the commotion in the country in general, and political wrangling in the offices of the cricket board on [the] matter of Pakistan captaincy in particular,” he........

© Dawn (Magazines)