SQUASH FOR HEALTH & WELLNESS BLOG
Squash – Promotion, Coaching, Tournaments, News and ReviewsArchive for Fall of Paki Empire
Fall of the Paki Empire
Pakistan’s squash empire has a great fall!
The biggest tragedy for our squash is that people at the helm of the game at the national level are unwilling to admit that Pakistan squash is currently experiencing its darkest phase
By Khalid Hussain
The world of Pakistan squash seems to have been entirely built on sand. From the coaching of the players, to the so-called national junior development programme, you will hardly find anything concrete in the very structure of the game in a country that once fuelled world squash with an unlimited supply of champions.
The biggest tragedy for our squash is that the people at the helm of the game at the national level are unwilling to admit that Pakistan squash is currently experiencing its darkest phase. The Pakistan Squash Federation (PSF) officials may like to think otherwise, but the bitter truth is that a sport which brought a nascent state on the map of international sport more than five decades back, is now in a shambles.
It’s a sad scenario but to bring any improvement in it, you will have to first accept it that that’s the way things stand for Pakistan squash at the moment. Less than ten years after the exit of Jansher Khan — the last of the country’s great champions — squash has moved perilously close to attaining the status of being a ‘dead sport’ in Pakistan.
Frankly speaking, squash was never a sport for the masses in Pakistan. Unlike cricket and hockey, squash seldom enjoyed the luxury of pulling huge crowds to the courts even at the time when legends Jahangir and Jansher Khan rode roughshod over their rivals on the international circuit.
But it was still the third most popular sport in the country, I would vouch for that. As a scribe who has been covering the sport for 18 years, I’ve kept a keen eye on the various ups and downs Pakistan squash has experienced since 1990.
Till a few years back, people used to ask me what’s happening in Pakistan and whether we will produce a world champion sometime soon. They may not actually go and see a squash match but they did take an interest in the game. But those squash fans have slowly disappeared. I won’t blame them. It’s difficult to follow a sport which you don’t play yourself and in which you don’t have any heroes to keep track of.
The era of Jahangir and Jansher is long gone and to tell you the truth nobody is really bothered when Aamir Atlas Khan wins a C grade tournament in Islamabad and is hailed as the next best thing for Pakistan squash.
For a few people, who are still involved with Pakistan squash either as ex-players, referees, family members of current players, officials or journalists, having a squash tournament in the country is like going through the motions. As a keen observer of the game, there is no doubt in my mind that the rare ‘title-winning triumphs’ our squash players achieve on home soil these days are engineered by the PSF. They do it intentionally or unintentionally is besides the point.
The only purpose that tournaments like the Chief of Air Staff (CAS) Open serve is that they keep our handful of squash professionals barely afloat in the top-100 world rankings.
As my good friend Jahangir Khan likes to point it, “I would like to see what happens to the rankings of our players if we stopped hosting such tournaments. I’m sure they (Pakistani players) would be unable to retain their place even in the top-100 rankings.”
For anybody who knows how the world rankings work, there cannot be a disagreement.
Less than one percent of professional squash is played in Pakistan. The rest happens in places like Europe, North America and across the Asian continent. If the PSF believes it can help a Pakistani become a world champion in the future just by holding tailor-made ranking events in the country, then it’s barking up the wrong tree. Unless our players start performing in ranking tournaments abroad, they cannot be considered world class players.
There is no doubt in my mind that Aamir Atlas and Farhan Mahboob are talented youngsters but they are not world class players. To attain that status, the boys will have to do well on the international circuit outside Pakistan, like that vastly-accomplished Egyptian boy Ramy Ashour, who can win a big squash match anywhere in the world.
Sadly, that hasn’t been happening for our very own squash players.
Take for example the Asian Squash Championships held in Kuwait earlier this year. The Pakistanis lost to underdogs Kuwait! When Jahangir heard about it, he thought it was a joke. “In the past, even our second or third string players would have beaten the Kuwaitis while playing with their left hands,” he remarks.
If the PSF people were unaware what was going on, then the debacle in Kuwait should have served as an eye-opener. But that didn’t happen. There was no post-mortem of that humiliating loss and it was business as usual for the gentlemen entrusted with the duties to run a game that became a part of our national fabric through the efforts of legends like Hashim Khan, Azam Khan, Roshan Khan, Mohibullah, Qamar Zaman, Gogi Alauddin, Jahangir and Jansher.
What the Air Marshals and the Wing Commanders at the helm of Pakistan squash don’t seem to understand is that the game needs much more than those cosmetic efforts they’ve been carrying out in recent times. The minor tournaments, the stereotype training camps, the tall claims are not enough. In fact in most cases, they are counterproductive.
Take for instance, events like the CAS Open.
In the present scenario, I believe these contests serve as mere crutches for our players, enabling them to remain a part of the cutthroat world of professional squash. They provide a short-term solution by helping them remain somewhere on the Professional Squash Association (PSA) computer.
But there are long-term repercussions of such an exercise. It provides a comfort zone to our players, which isn’t exactly the right luxury for budding sportsmen. The players know if they do well in a series of the Pakistan circuit events, they would earn enough world ranking points to stay in the top-100. For them, the more important part is that they will also continue to make a living. The sort of hunger that fuelled the great Khans is missing.
Events like the CAS Open also serve PSF’s purpose. Having an all-Pakistan final of a world ranking event in Islamabad is good publicity for them. It provides the platform for the PSF chief to claim that a new era has begun for Pakistan squash.
Is that really the case? It could be provided we are content with having a slim presence of our players in the top-100 and are unperturbed if our national team continues to lose against minnows Kuwait, Qatar or India.
It’s time that we stopped fooling ourselves. Pakistan squash has achieved dizzying heights in the past and it would be criminal to let it sink to abysmal depths.
It’s time that we launch a nation-wide drive to lift the fortunes of Pakistan squash.
The biggest responsibility lies on the shoulders of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). For years, PAF has been controlling national squash affairs and provides PSF with financial and administrative support. In fact, PSF is actually a part of the PAF, like a multi-national will have a separate division looking after its Corporate Social Responsibility.
In return, the PAF chief gets the post of PSF president. He can install his handpicked officers to become senior vice-president, secretary and treasurer of the federation. To be fair with the PAF, it has contributed a lot to Pakistan squash in the past. But the problem is that its contribution towards Pakistan squash is insufficient in the current circumstances.
To be continued next Sunday (in the second part, the writer will discuss the problems facing Pakistan squash and the ways and means that can be used to promote it)
The writer is Editor Sports
‘The News’ Karachi
khalidhraj@gmail.com
S4HU
SQUASH FOR HEALTH & WELLNESS BLOG 