#pakistani cricket team

[localrants]

Whole year, i stay low, i keep quiet and mind my own business. But as soon as cricket season arrives, I let my inner animal roar. My heart dances, butterflies flutter in my stomach. I jump on every six, i cheer on every wicket. I make sure there's Internet on my phone and Tv's remote is not broken. You can hear commentaries from multiple homes at once in our small buildings. Before the match starts, my whole family gather in our lounge, we make chaye, and get fixated at our places. Phir chaye banti rehti hai aur hum lagay rehtay hain. Babar ki cober drive ho ya Rizwan ki century, Shaheen ka out ho ya Naseem ki wicket ho, Haris ki 150+ ho ya Shadab ki fielding ho, we stay there, support the men in green till the end. Kabhi acha khel k bhi haartay hain aur kabhi bura khel k bhi jeet jatay hain. Jeet ho ya haar hou, team green hamesha aik heart attacking qism ka match deti hai. Unexpected, out of the world aur classy.

Tw, hosh sambhalo, hawaas jagao, gear upp!

Asia Cup is soo on!!

You go Team Pakistan 🇵🇰💚

Best of luck others, may the best team win. ❤️

[aashiqui-aashiqui]

its ind vs pak and im not ready

[tabileaks]

T20 World Cup, Surprising Confession from Haris: Saim, Azam, Afridi, Usman | Tabi Leaks

[latestsports]

Pakistani cricket legend on the iconic battle with Sachin Tendulkar

Even after all these years, there is nothing like India vs. Pakistan in cricket. The record between the two teams shared in the 1990s and early 2000s will always remain unmatched. Tendulkar's knock of 136 in vain will go down in history as one of the most painful innings for an Indian cricket fan, but for Pakistan, it remains among their greatest Test matches of all time. Pakistan's architect of that win, Saqlain, recalled one of the moments from the Test match and explained how he tricked Tendulkar into playing the shot because of which he lost his wicket. Read More...

[hasdrubal-gisco]

funny that 2028 olympics will finally include cricket and the only two countries that care (india & pakistan) will get mogged by team USA made up of indians and pakistanis

[i-cant-sing]

from the way India is getting terrorist attacks from Pakistan and Muslims murdering Hindu girls and cutting them into pieces in India

I can definitely say I am scared of Muslims as a Hindu

So.... you're saying.... the Hindus... never hurt Muslims? Never killed them? As a religious majority in India, Hindus never hurt minorities???

Yeah, as someone with common sense- I can smell the Islamophobia from a mile.

And I never even got the whole "India is better than Pakistan", or "Pakistan is better than India", stfu- yall came from the subcontinent, got colonised and shit.

And as far as I know, most Indians don't even hate Muslims/Pakistanis. Or at least, the literate ones don't. This just feels like propaganda.

The only time I've ever seen India and Pakistani people be hating each other is during cricket. And yes, while India is the better team- the Pakistan cricket players are 😍🥰🤍

I'm not even up to date on the news BUT DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE WHOLE BAN ON HIJAB/BURQA and not to mention didn't the BJP just destroy a mosque to build a temple?????

[swaymarked]

some of my buddies have incredibly obscure interests. asked a 6’4” white defenseman born and raised in rural texas if he wanted to go out once and he said he couldn’t because the pakistani cricket team had a game he wanted to watch. What

[mariacallous]

MIRAN SHAH, Pakistan—Mohsin Dawar’s campaign for re-election to Pakistan’s parliament was almost cut short before it began in early January when his convoy was ambushed in a village just a few minutes’ drive from his home in Miran Shah in Pakistan’s North Waziristan district, near the lawless borderlands with Afghanistan. As his car came under attack from militants armed with automatic weapons, sniper rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades, he and his team were lured into a compound by residents who promised them safety.

It was a trap. Once the gates closed behind Dawar, the attack intensified. For almost an hour, he said, they were pinned down. Police and Pakistan Army backup finally arrived but not before two of Dawar’s team had been shot and injured. The vehicle took more than 80 bullets, and the windows show just how accurate the attackers’ aim was: Either one of the shots to the windshield or passenger window would have struck and likely killed him if he hadn’t been protected by bulletproof glass.

The Jan. 3 attack on a popular, outspoken, liberal leader in one of the most vulnerable regions of a country fighting a growing insurgency by extremist militants hardly registered in Pakistan, where most believe the military attempted—and failed—to manipulate the Feb. 8 election in an effort to install Nawaz Sharif as prime minister for a fourth time and where media operate under tight government control.

The election wasn’t quite the foregone conclusion that had been expected, with candidates aligned with the jailed cricket star-turned-populist leader Imran Khan winning more votes than each of the major parties—the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party—forcing them into a coalition to get the majority needed to form a government. PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif nominated his brother, Shehbaz Sharif, to become prime minister and his daughter Maryam Nawaz as chief minister of Punjab province, ensuring the dynastic line continues.

Candidates across the country, not only those loyal to Khan, alleged that the results had been rigged against them and in favor of military-backed candidates. Two days after the election, with his seat still undeclared amid growing concerns nationwide about vote rigging, Dawar and about a dozen of his supporters were injured when security forces opened fire on them as they gathered outside the official counting room.

At least three people died of their injuries; What Dawar had believed was an unassailable lead, according to polling by his secular National Democratic Movement party, had disappeared. In the count that was listed as final by Pakistan’s Election Commission, the seat went to Misbah Uddin of the Taliban-aligned Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam-Fazl party. Dawar is still recovering from a serious leg wound.

Dawar’s hometown is, once again, the battleground of what he calls “Project Taliban”—a war against the Pakistani state.

The Taliban’s transnational ambitions are threatening security beyond the borders of Afghanistan, and nowhere is this more evident than in Pakistan’s northwest, where the militant presence has been growing since the terrorist-led group came back to power in August 2021. Attacks on civilians, soldiers, and police have soared. The region bristles with checkpoints and hilltop outposts and is heavily patrolled on the ground and in the air by the Pakistan Army and armed border police. That’s during daylight hours, Dawar told Foreign Policy. Once night falls, it’s a different story.

“The Army checkposts you will only see during the daytime. Before sunset, they go to their barracks, and the people of Waziristan are at the disposal of the militants. Everyone has to secure himself or herself for their own protection,” he said. “It is militarized, and I believe it is a continuation of a proxy war that was started long ago. ‘Project Taliban’ is still continuing.”

The roots of militancy and terrorism in Waziristan go back to colonial times, when the mostly Pashtun people here were characterized as fearless fighters and pressed into service for the British. The stereotype stuck; the region became a center of recruitment and training for young men to fight the Soviets after Moscow’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

After the United States led an invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, leaders of the Taliban and al Qaeda moved over the border and for the following 20 years enjoyed the protection of the Pakistani military’s intelligence wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

The ISI wanted a tame Taliban-led Afghanistan to thwart the ambitions of archrival India to become the dominant regional power. The Taliban had different ideas. The group’s return to power has inspired affiliated and like-minded groups worldwide, as the extremist regime provides safe haven for dozens of militant groups, according to the U.N. Security Council. They now openly use Afghanistan as a base to train fighters seeking to overthrow governments from China and Tajikistan to Iran and Israel. Among them is Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which, Afrasiab Khattak, a former Pakistani lawmaker and now a political analyst, said, is “just Taliban, there is no difference.”

Earlier this month, the Taliban reiterated the group’s stance on the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan when the acting foreign minister, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, said the government doesn’t recognize the Durand Line that has delineated the two countries since 1893. The line runs through the tribal regions, dividing ethnic Pashtun and Baloch tribespeople. Recent bilateral tensions have often focused on the border, with tit-for-tat closures impacting cross-border trade.

In comments that Pakistan’s foreign ministry later called “fanciful” and “self-serving”—and which underlined the simmering hostility between Pakistan and the Taliban it helped put in power—Stanikzai said: “We have never recognized Durand and will never recognize it; today half of Afghanistan is separated and is on the other side of the Durand Line. Durand is the line which was drawn by the English on the heart of Afghans.”

The Security Council said in 2022 that the TTP had up to 5,500 fighters in Afghanistan. That number has likely risen, Dawar said, as neither country, mired in economic mismanagement and crisis, can offer its youthful population an alternative livelihood. Victory brought strength, Dawar said, and the Taliban “can attract the youth because money and power is what attracts youth the most.”

The simmering conflict threatens to return Pakistan’s northwest to the wasteland of less than decade ago, when the TTP controlled the region: Dissenters were routinely killed. Terrorists turned the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), now part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after an administrative merger in 2018, into a death zone. Millions of people were displaced as those who could leave fled to peace and safety.

Those who stayed lived in fear and poverty until the Army finally took action in 2016 and ended the TTP’s 10-year reign by simply killing them, often in attacks that also killed civilians, or pushing them over the porous border into Afghanistan, where they joined Taliban forces fighting the U.S.-supported republic until it collapsed in 2021.

The TTP wants an independent state in these border regions. It broke a cease-fire with the government in November 2022 and has demanded that the merger of the FATA with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa be reversed. Attacks on the military and police have escalated alarmingly, presenting what a senior government official, who spoke anonymously, called “not only an existential threat to the state but also to the common man”—a recognition that what Dawar calls “Project Taliban” not only threatens to engulf the northwest but, if not contained, poses a potential threat to a fragile and barely stable state.

Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar disagreed, telling reporters before the Feb. 8 vote that the military had the upper hand in the region, by virtue of numbers alone. “I don’t see that they pose an existential threat to the state of Pakistan,” he said, while nevertheless conceding it was a “big challenge” that could take years to dislodge.

He could be right. After the failure of peace talks, ironically brokered by the Taliban’s acting interior minister, U.N.-listed terrorist Sirajuddin Haqqani, Pakistan stepped up pressure on the TTP. Asfandyar Mir, an expert on South Asian political and security issues, said this appeared to have made a “marginal” difference.

“For instance, we haven’t seen a complex or suicide bombing attack by the TTP or one of its fronts for a couple of months now,” he said. “In that sense, it appears the Taliban is sensitive to pressure,” though “smaller-scale attacks and the erosion of Pakistani state authority in parts of the northwest continue.” Things could change, he said, once a new government is installed and, perhaps, brings some stability to the political landscape.

For the people of Waziristan, struggling to survive unemployment, a lack of development, and government neglect of basic services such as roads, electricity, clean water, and education—coupled with a downturn in vital cross-border trade with Afghanistan—priorities have again switched to peace. “The local people have learned through their own bitter experience of devastating war” what a Taliban resurgence means, said Khattak, the political analyst. The security establishment is playing a dangerous game, indulging the TTP so that “local people become so desperate they want the military to come in and help them,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of people have marched through the streets and bazaars of North and South Waziristan over the past year, demanding action against terrorism and an end to state violence. Yet it continues. “No one is safe. Everyone is a target,” said a man in his 30s as he rolled off a list of potential victims: politicians, business people, teachers, doctors, journalists, civic activists, women’s rights advocates, anyone deemed “un-Islamic.” Even barbers are not immune from extremists who ban men from shaving: The day before the Jan. 3 attack on Dawar’s convoy, the bodies of six young hairdressers were found in the nearby town of Mir Ali.

Another local resident pointed to a “Taliban checkpoint” on the road between Miran Shah and the bustling town of Bannu. The long-haired, kohl-eyed, gun-toting youths in sequined caps stand outside their roadside hut in the shadow of an Army post on the hill above. Around the clock, the resident said, they randomly stop vehicles to shake down the drivers. “It’s just for money,” he said. “Money and power.”

But it’s killing, too, “on a daily basis,” said a government worker who left Miran Shah with his family at the height of the TTP terror and visited in early February from Peshawar so he and his wife could vote for Dawar. The aim, he said, is “to create an atmosphere of fear so that people leave and what is here is theirs.”

Dawar said the turning of the Taliban tables on Pakistan “was predictable.” The Taliban “are now a threat to Central Asia. They are now a threat to Iran, to Pakistan, and to even China. All of them thought we will control the Taliban after the takeover. The problem is it didn’t happen,” he said.

In 2011, then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Pakistan’s leaders that they couldn’t keep “snakes,” as she called the Taliban, in their own backyard and “expect them only to bite your neighbors.”

“There used to be a time when people were sent from here to Afghanistan. Now they are coming around, they are biting,” Dawar said.

[aro-as-in-straight-as-a]

my condolences to the Pakistani cricket team, I really dont think we deserved that one

[aashiqui-aashiqui]

with the t20 world cup approaching soon im gonna have to go back to fulfilling my duty on here (being the only one to post about pakistan)

[evansbby]

Pakistan cricket team was such a joke like those people are paid off I refuse to believe they’re genuinely that bad lmao usa was literally just a bunch of international students in a group project

lmfaoo but you gotta respect the USA team like one of their players someone pulled out his LinkedIn and bro works for a tech company and cricketing is his secondary hobby and he’s found himself in the World Cup 😭😭 he was also just an international student now he’s playing for team USA it’s so funny and embarassing for the Pakistani team bc USA’s team is literally 80% comprised of Indian and Pakistani international students 😭😭😭 BUT GOOD FOR THEM HONESTLY YOU CANT EVEN HATE IT

[firefliesdies]

I heard that the Pakistani cricket team is controlled by fascists so I'm happy for both the teams now ig

[bambioleo]

my dad and i were talking about our national cricket team and with the new senior additions really just made it half pakistani and half indian im dead istg theres literally only one emirati guy and two of them are literally my same age and went to school near mine

[muslimintp-1999-girl]

BEST NEWS TODAY 💚🤩

Me to the Pakistani cricket team after this match:

[after-zeno]

3 July 2023

Extract 1: It took the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket two years of exhaustive research to conclude there is an elitist and exclusionary culture at the heart of the game in England. Had Cindy Butts and her fellow commission members been at Lord’s on Sunday, they could have taken five minutes to come to much the same view.

The title of their report published last month, Holding up a Mirror to Cricket, neatly sums up what members of the Marylebone Cricket Club – the self-appointed guardian of the rules and spirit of the game – unwittingly did when they abused the Australian team from inside the Long Room.

Extract 2: Footage from the Long Room shows that whatever was said in heat of those spiteful short moments stopped [Usman] Khawaja in his in tracks. Where most Australian players shrugged or laughed off the abuse as they continued on to the dressing room, Khawaja confronted his hecklers with the same calmness he brings to a seaming pitch.

He later explained to Nine’s broadcasters that he was more disappointed than angry. “Lord’s is one of my favourite places to come,” he said. “There is so much respect shown at Lord’s, particularly in the member’s pavilion and the Long Room, but there wasn’t today.

Extract 3: This is the third time that Khawaja, the Muslim son of Pakistani immigrants and, according to former Australian captain Ricky Ponting, “probably the nicest man that’s ever walked on the planet”, has copped the worst of England.

During the first Test at Edgbaston, when he was dismissed after a match-winning innings of 141, the foul-mouthed send-off he received from Ollie Robinson was jarringly out of place. Robinson was unapologetic for his actions, saying those who couldn’t handle an earful in an Ashes series, couldn’t handle much.

After the match, Khawaja’s faith became fodder in a broader culture war, when nationalist politician Nigel Farage questioned why the Australians didn’t douse themselves in alcohol in victory. “Once again the Australian cricket team do not celebrate in champagne style because one of the team members is a Muslim,” Farage tweeted. “Are we all to suspend normal life because of the minority?”