This is not a piece about Babar Azam’s fan club.
The mere fact that I have to begin proceedings with this disclaimer speaks volumes of the toxic nature of the Babar Azam discourse vortex, which is what this article actually aims to address.
It is a phenomenon that a vast majority of Pakistan cricket enthusiasts seem to be stuck in, including media personnel. Shocker.
A conversation on the fan club itself deserves no more air-time than 20 seconds of breath on a podcast, and in no world should it ever exist as a written column, that too by a senior sports journalist.
In the age of social media, fan clubs exist for all top athletes. It comes with the territory, and is a reality that one simply can not curb. And to be fair, you expect such behaviour from fans, because fan is an abbreviation of the word fanatic, after all.
That said, when so-called veteran journalists pen down paragraph after paragraph dismissing Babar Azam’s fan club, with a headline that throws other active cricketers under the bus for no reason, it is proof that we are itchingly close to a point of no return.
The abyss is real, and the pit is bottomless.
It makes you wonder if you are trapped in a dimension where all Pakistan cricket discourse starts and ends with Babar Azam, and renowned media organisations are publishing op-eds which have the combined wit and verbiage of a four year old toddler, ChatGPT, and a broken toothpick.
It is moments like these where you wish Rick Sanchez would lend you his portal gun, allowing you to jump into a dimension where cricket correspondents had something better to talk about, or were dolphins instead of humans, which would automatically increase their intelligence and communication levels.
It gets worse, of course. The current PCB Chairman, who also happens to be the Interior Minister of the country, amongst holding other designated roles, has been busy sharing articles directed at said fan club.
Re-sharing pieces may still be considered mild compared to press releases which have also been issued in the recent past, tackling the same faux-ordeal. Real PCB employees were made to draft real press releases warning fourteen year old fans who have only recently hit puberty.
Also, why would anyone in a position of authority choose to single out any cricketer in a positive or negative light? All that would do is draw more ire towards the player, the media organisation under question, and their own self.
Legitimacy goes out the window, and music beats in the vortex get louder and louder, to which both the mob and protestors dance in rebellion.
Ever heard of statistically-driven rationale to help back your arguments and decisions? You know, the academic way of approaching matters of deep concern within the masses.
Digits almost always paint better pictures than words. In Babar’s case, an otherworldly peak across formats was followed by a dip of catastrophic proportions.
The prodigious batter was on the stairway to kingship, and against all odds he dropped off a precipice in dramatic fashion, straight into a wormhole of mediocrity and lack of self belief.
It is a case study worth diving deep into, because how did a cricketer who averaged 60 plus in ODI cricket and nearly 50 in Tests slump to having numbers which aren’t even good enough for a replacement batter?
I’m not mincing my words here, or being too harsh.
In his last 25 Test innings Babar Azam is averaging 23.6 with the bat, with just three half centuries to his name.
In ODIs, he has batted 17 times since the start of 2024 with an average of 37.1, striking at less than 77, where roughly 6 out of 10 deliveries that he faces are dot balls.
Here is the kicker, however. All this media furore exists despite Babar still being a regular member of Pakistan’s ODI and Test squads.
The only format in which he has been axed is twenty over cricket, in which he has famously struggled with his strike rate.
His output in the shortest format worked wonders as long as Pakistan’s bowling attack struck frequently, and it became outdated when those same bowlers regressed, and global T20 cricket got injected with the sort of steroids that would make a tortoise race at the speed of a hare. And this particular hare has shown no signs of stopping for a nap.
So what exactly is all the fuss about? Why does the vortex exist?
Babar’s fans will complain like supporters of any superstar. This is business as usual. It would be no different for Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi.
So why in WG Grace’s beard is Pakistan’s sports media industry obsessed with a non-notion?
Who will talk about the macro arcs and narratives surrounding cricket, or the trajectory and health of Pakistan’s T20I team in transition?
Is anyone at all interested in Pakistan’s team combination, Mike Hesson’s strategic input, and Salman Ali Agha’s captaincy decisions?
Can we get a minimum of five cricket journalists working at reputable television networks to crunch some numbers that highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the current T20 team, without having the urge to peddle agendas?
Where exactly are we as an industry? Stuck in the same vortex, that too deliberately, to milk payout dollars from a big name that will obviously polarize opinion?
I agree that the Muskification of Twitter, now X, has had a role to play in this mess, but are we consciously letting our greed outweigh our integrity, which subsequently ruins all credibility? Or are we on specific payrolls, acting as spokespeople for the powerful?
And lastly, where are we as a cricket administration? At a juncture where giving validation to fanboying teenagers is more important than creating a fully functioning domestic structure with long term goals and planning? Or at a fork in the road where we can either attract negative PR towards certain cricketers and the administration itself, or empower the team and trust the coaches to do their respective jobs which they were hired for?
The vortex has brought about a deplorable state of affairs. Poisonous to its very core, with its existence making negligible sense. All it ends up doing is giving clout chasers exactly what they are after. Cheap thrills that can pay the bills. And in that process, it has destroyed a semi-functioning machine that still delivered the goods every now and then.
That machine is out-of-form Babar, by the way, who looks mentally worn out, and can not seem to buy a run. He is ultimately a human being, not much different from you and me, who definitely won’t be left alone by his supporters and detractors, but should at least not be at the center of the cricket board’s attention.
So, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. Jack please rid yourself of the Babar schtick.
Pro-Babar keyboard warriors will remain. Nature demands them to remain. And so will the ultra anti-Babar lot, who for some reason are under the impression that they are better than the fan club. One and the same, folks. Ignorance attracts ignorance.
You, on the other hand, whoever you may be, have a choice to make.
You can either rot away in the vortex and lose the remaining brain cells that you have somehow managed to retain up until this point, or you can snap out of this venomous hellhole and appreciate the very many things that this beautiful sport has to offer.
Wake up and smell the cricket.