The joke's on Pakistan

There is a mythology about Pakistan cricket which is often swallowed whole even by those normally allergic to hazy romanticism. Something about our team being mercurial, passionate, and above all instinctive. It's all very exciting, apparently. Lots of thrills and spills. (Spills aplenty if Salman Butt is fielding.) And so it goes, that Pakistan cricket is a fascination, an eternal conundrum. The riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma concealed within a murky crotch guard.

Well, frankly, balls to that. I've had enough and I don't buy it anymore. Let's discard the ethereal mumbo jumbo and get down to the facts, the material, the bodily. Shahid Afridi play-slapped Saeed Ajmal in the first Twenty20 against New Zealand but caught the poor offspinner under the eye with a stray fingernail. And that's how I feel: cut up. Fingered, nailed, screwed over. Following my team of late has been a serious pain in the Ijaz (I allude here, of course, to Butt the Bigger.)

So let's get real. The myths have grown old, tired, and untrue. Like we did with Thor, Zeus, and Sohail Khan's talent, we the human race must stop seeing things that don't exist. Too often we look upon Pakistan cricket as some kind of enchanting, exotic, unfolding narrative of the "heat and dust" variety. Cunning and plotting is just part of the wily native's repertoire, brainless batting is just an expression of uninhibited physicality, serial no-balling is just a natural indifference towards imposed rules and regulations.

It's time to call a spade a shovel and bury our illusions. Pakistan cricket is not a mystery, it has become a farce. I do not ignore our moments of glory in the darkness (World Twenty20 win, recent victory over India, the wonder that is Mohammed Aamer), it's just that these have been eclipsed. Our demeanour is Peter Sellers in The Party, not Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Our exuberance carries the surface jest of Govinda, not the hidden depths of Amitabh Bachchan. We're only good for cheap laughs, not curiosity and admiration. We belong in a bad newspaper comic strip, not a dark, brilliant graphic novel.

This isn't a problem in itself. (Indeed, Wuthering Heights is a total snooze, and boy, can that Govinda shake his thing.) The issue is that the joke's always on us: characters in a farce are laughed at, not with. What doubly sucks is that the joke's gone stale. It's really not funny anymore.

Here's new captain Mohammad Yousuf, among the alleged plotters in the downfall of Younis Khan, speaking yesterday: "My main target is to unite the team because our religion also teaches us to unite for a cause and the New Zealand tour will be a tough task for us." As ever, the jokes write themselves in Pakistan cricket, but when irony is as obvious and glaring as that, nobody's even raising a smirk.

I wish I could say "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore", like Peter Finch in Network. At least there'd be some animation to my frustration. But all I'm left with is feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. I stare, baffled and bored, as the absurdity of it all reveals itself over and over again with the eternal recurrence of resignations, infighting, and - lest we forget some cricket actually happens sometimes - defeat.

It's one thing being desensitised to the violence paralysing the country on an almost daily basis, but to the plight of my beloved Pakistan cricket team too? I never thought I'd see the day that happened. Trouble is, it happens so very, very often. Even the best jokes don't bear multiple tellings.