Cricket: Pakistan Hits A Snag · Global Voices
Faisal Kapadia

Pakistan fans after cricket win. Photo by Flickr user Acyn, used under a creative commons license http://www.flickr.com/photos/acyn/3722402256/
In last June, when Pakistan won the world Twenty20 cup championship beating Sri Lanka in the final, this cricket loving nation went berserk. Pakistan had not won any major cricket championship since the 1992 world cup, so this win could not have come at a better time. The proud Pakistanis were delighted and you could hear the echo of the joy in the blogosphere. Some Pakistani bloggers launched an e-rally in support of the Pakistan cricket team.
The Global Pakistani reacts to this feat:
Pakistanis are arguably among the most resilient people in the history of this earth. No other nation can soak up as much pressures that Pakistan has in recent years.
It is therefore no surprise that despite being deprived of top level international cricket for more than 15 months, being isolated internationally and reeling under the most harrowing incident of the game, fighting a war inside our borders and looking after three million of our brothers and sisters made homeless due to conflict, we have managed come out on top of the world in yesterday’s T20 final.
Zubair sheikh at A Students View tells what winning in cricket means to the Pakistanis:
Our Cricket Team has won the world (cup) in T20 form of the game and looks good enough to defend the title under the new captain.
All these events have given the gloomy nation a lot to cheer and think about.
However, their recent tour in Sri Lanka proved a disaster. Many fans are screaming that Pakistan hit a new low in their performance. Khansahab at Legslip says:
Pakistan lost the Test series quite humiliatingly and then they lost the ODI series too. It might have been fascinating for some individuals to see Pakistan garner some pride at the end of the ODI series, however to the routine observer, nothing new was seen from Pakistan.
Sri Lankan blogger Kaputa also wonders why Pakistan performed badly:
After their poor batting efforts in the First Two Tests, it was nice to see the front line Pakistani batsmen, bat the way we know they can. How they failed to do likewise earlier was inexplicable.
This poses a question whether Pakistan only excel at the Twenty 20 format of the cricket and fail in the other formats. The fans did not took the bad performance in Sri Lanka lightly as the players came under fire back home. Match fixing rumors are also being hard.
In my own blog I wrote about the effects of the series loss in Pakistan:
Cricket is a very cruel sport. Less than a month ago the whole nation was cheering as Yunis khan and his team won the world Twenty 20 cup, they were heralded as heroes for beating Sri Lanka in the final so clinically, however the test series they have now lost in Sri Lanka has brought out the daggers once more.
Being champions a month ago was excellent for all of us, but now the team has to prove that they are willing and worthy of that tag by displaying consistency, not miracle and dumb moments.