"I don't think anything prepared me for the hostility I was going to face," the British-born Wasim Khan says of overseeing a beloved sport in a country where many see him only as a foreigner
Wasim Kkan, who runs the Packistan Cricket Board, in his hometown of Birmingham, England, Aug. 16, 2020. Since moving last year to Lahore, where the Pakistan Cricket Board is based, he has faced an unending torrent of criticism for the changes he has instituted, for his European upbringing and for not being Pakistani enough, for being an “import” doing a job that should be reserved for a Pakistani. Image: Andrew Testa/The New York Times
LONDON — Wasim Khan has spent his life immersed in Pakistani cricket, even as he spent very little of that life in Pakistan. To his critics, that latter bit is precisely the problem.
Khan was hooked early. As the son of Pakistani immigrants to Britain, Khan grew up listening to his father, his uncles and his cousins talk passionately about cricket late into the night. They told tales of Pakistan’s cricketing superstars, of its stunning victories, and of the huge crowds that regularly packed the dusty stadiums a world away from the Khans’ home in the Small Heath section of Birmingham, the city that served as a magnet for the generations of migrants from South Asia in the 1960s and ’70s.
Khan was, and is, a Pakistan cricket fan. He was even when he started to show his own talent for the sport, a talent with the bat that earned him a place in England’s under-19 team. Even when he became the first Briton of Pakistani heritage to sign a professional club cricket contract. And even later, when he was appointed to lead the Leicestershire County Cricket Club, becoming the first nonwhite chief executive of a major professional British sports team.
So when he was offered the opportunity to run Pakistan’s cricket board in 2018, Khan had no hesitation. The lure was personal, not just professional.
“Part of the appeal of going back to Pakistan was being with your own people, the whole understanding of the place, the feeling when you get up in the morning and you hear the call to prayer,” he said.
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