At some point Sunday evening, while doing an over by over live gig on the World T20 final, what struck me was the un-Pakistan-like way the team fashioned the victory: meticulous, methodical, responsible, clinical. Sambit Bal agrees, and says what was odd in a good sort of way was the way victory was accomplished.

Resolute. Restrained. Mature. Measured. Not in the most bizarre of your dreams would you associate these words with Afridi. But those very words summed up his performance today. He wanted the responsibility, he grabbed it and fulfilled it. And his approach to the game was a microcosm of how Pakistani played the final.

It was a clinical, thought-out and utterly professional display. Very un-Pakistani. Yorkers didn't thud into pads or uproot stumps; there were no magic moments from the spinners, either; and the ball didn't fly over the ropes.

What works for Pakistan is the unscripted electricity it brings to cricket fields -- you never know till it has come and gone just what havoc it will cause, if any. Who writes these scripts, asks Kamran Abbasi.

Younis Khan followed in the footsteps of his hero Imran Khan and lifted a World Cup for Pakistan. Each intervening year has made this victory sweeter. Younis also followed his hero in two other ways. First, he managed to pull together a disjointed Pakistan team into a world beating unit. Second, he announced his retirement--but only from Twenty20 cricket.

He may as well. How can you beat the drama of this moment? The past years of desperation in Pakistan; isolation in international cricket. No cricket ground you can call home. A nomadic life with sporadic international cricket.

At the end Younis Khan dedicated the victory to Bob Woolmer, his mentor, and to the long-suffering people of his homeland. Whoever scripted this is a genius.

Dileep Premachandran finds in the win a fairy story retold. It is Cinderella with a twist; it is the ugly sister who wakes to find a glass slipper on her foot and a prince on his knees.

This is no Cinderella story. This is about the ugly sister who woke up to find that she had a glass slipper on her feet. Remember that this is the team that has no home series to look forward to in the foreseeable future, the country that had the ICC Champions Trophy taken away from it and given to South Africa. These are the players who were prevented from playing in the IPL, and the same side that was annihilated by South Africa and India in warm-up matches. But less than three weeks on, they are champions of the world. Their fans, who have had to put up with so much over the past few years and whose support has been so steadfast and magnificent, deserve this perhaps more than the players do. This was their moment, one that they won't ever forget.

....

And like the Danes, Pakistan's support has illuminated this competition. Some might have found the horn-blaring celebrations at Trent Bridge a little foreign, but it's exactly that sort of passion that has kept the game going in Pakistan despite all the trials and tribulations. Lunatics that target even sportsmen may be holding parts of the country to ransom, but the spirit of 1992 was in ample evidence at Lord's today. In times of trouble, the inheritors of the Kardar-Fazal-Imran legacy invariably find a way, and while the world may not yet heed Younis's impassioned plea to go and play there, it's once again been reminded that you ignore Pakistan cricket at your peril.

What would have been just another final was given context and nuance by an event atrocity that happened [a round up post from then, and a piece I had done for Rediff at the time] three and a half months ago [Almost unnoticed, the first arrest in that case was made three days ago].

The attack on the Sri Lankan team March 3 robbed cricket of its amulet. All along, the sport had assumed that no matter how vicious the merchants of mayhem or how anarchic their intentions, they would never touch sport. The backlash from the general populace would spell doom for the ideology of terrorism, it was argued.

Inevitably, the T20 World Cup final got framed against the backdrop of recent history: a match-up between a team and a country that became international pariahs in the wake of that atrocity, against the team that had toured Pakistan in a show of solidarity and found itself in the crosshairs.

Three and a half months later, and sport's great gift for reinvention has delivered a contest that flicks two fingers at the perpetrators of the Lahore atrocity, and proves that - without wishing to overload the sentiment - the human spirit cannot be crushed by cold calculation. Pakistan and Sri Lanka will take centre stage at Lord's on Sunday for the final of the most joyful international tournament the game has arranged in years. Twenty20 may be cricket for hedonists, but after everything these two teams and their respective nations have been through of late, the need to lay on a party suddenly feels like the only serious obligation.

A case of reading too much into a game of cricket? No, says Sambit Bal, who called it a match that's bigger than the game.

Osman Samiuddin says no matter what happens in the game, things back home will not dramatically change -- but that is not the point. It is the nature of contemporary reality that Pakistan finds itself in the headlines, daily, for all the wrong reasons. It becomes therefore doubly important to celebrate those rare moments when brightness pierces through the all-enveloping dark.

What can a mere sporting win do? A lot. There is no overstating the healing power of sport. Sports fans live their dreams through the lives of their sporting heroes and win radiates joy. And it's a joy that spreads easily and it helps forge bonds and ease pain, however momentarily. Most sportsmen are aware of this power and that this makes them worthy.

It is unlikely that when they go out in their country's colours tomorrow the Sri Lankans and the Pakistanis will be oblivious to the wider significance of the match. Rather than weighing them down, such knowledge should be empowering. It can invest their game with a little more meaning and passion. Twenty20 is not a game of grand ideas and epic performances. It's a game of moments; inspiration matters.

It was necessary also in this uncertain new world of cricket, where there is more money and less time, a world which was in danger of passing Pakistan by. By reaching the final of the premier World Twenty20 event twice, Pakistan has said to one and all that they are still a force, no matter what the strife, that they cannot be ignored or sidelined in this world. Men such as Afridi, Gul, Akmal and Ajmal cannot be ignored in this world. They can contribute richly to it.

Pakistan matters because no team could have pulled off what they have just pulled off and in the manner they did. Their march has not been just a great cricketing tale or a fine sporting one; it is a simpler, more important one of how men do things sometimes nobody expects them to, of how from any darkness light can emerge. Even if we're not sure how the tale was written, how long it will go on and when, or whether, it will happen again, we must celebrate it, be grateful for it and not forget it.

As the overlong IPL wound down, I had thought I was all tapped out, that I wouldn't be able to work up any kind of enthusiasm for the World Cup immediately following. And yet, the final is minutes away from the start -- and even at this remove, there is a strange sense of excitement. It is a feeling, I realize, I wouldn't have had if this contest was between any of the other teams in the tournament. Even India.

Here's to cricket.

Consider this sequence at the start of Pakistan's innings:

Kamran Akmal cuts the second ball of the day fiercely past point. He then thumps, off the front foot, the last ball of that over, short in length, past cover. The second ball of the second over produces a wicket; Akmal pulls the third in front of square leg and drives the next off the front foot, threading it between Herschelle Gibbs at short cover and Graeme Smith at mid off; to the sixth ball of that over Shahid Afridi ducks in exaggerated mime of defense and gets the wide; the sixth ball is rebowled and Afridi plays a forehand down the line that screams to the fence behind the bowler. To the second ball of the third over, Akmal glides onto his front foot and tees off, hitting through the line, up and a long way over the long off boundary; to the next ball, he is out top-edging a pull.... And so it went for the early part of the Pakistan innings.

When the Proteas came out to chase, Smith and Jacques Kallis get the score to 30/0 at the end of four overs -- and memory fails to regurgitate a single shot those two played though they had kept pace with Pakistan, which had made 32/2 in its first four overs.

Or consider these two contrasting images: In the second over of the Pakistan innings, Parnell gets a short, lifting delivery to move off the seam; Shahzaib Hasan shapes to pull and finds the ball hurrying onto him; the ball flies off the toe of his bat and Roelof van der Merwe at mid on spins around on his axis, races away as the ball soars over his shoulder and flings himself forward to pull off a blinder.

Versus: 5th over, ball three, Abdur Razzaq bangs one in slightly short of length, Smith goes for the pull and ends up heaving it up in the air. Umer Gul moves to his right where he should have been going back, realizes his error, back pedals, takes time off to check if he can pass the buck to Shahid Afridi, then reaches for the catch, lets it fall behind him, falls over and bangs his head hard on the ground, almost knocking himself out.

It was that kind of day: the machinelike efficiency of the Proteas versus the electric madness of the Pakistanis. Clinical efficiency will on paper trump random bursts of electricity any day -- but on the ground, especially in a format where a game can spin on its axis in the space of an over or less, inspired madness can produce amazing results. A machine knows its limitations and plays within them; the madman [and I don't use this word in a pejorative sense] knows nothing except the prompts of fleeting moments.

The machine was best represented by Jacques Kallis, who returned to the side and played with efficiency. With the ball, he bowled two controlled overs of pace and bounce for 14 runs before Smith turned to spin; with the bat he kept his end going with a controlled -- that word again -- 64 runs off 54 deliveries. It was a performance worth the consummate professional -- yet it contained no incendiary moments that could light fires in his team mates. ["We had Albie padded up in the 11th over but if we don't lose a wicket, he can't come in," Smith said post-match; with Jean Paul Duminy playing his trademark nudge and run, Kallis motored along till the 18th over before getting out].

The epitome of Pakistan's own special brand of cricketing madness was -- as he has been so often in his career -- Shahid Afridi. Alternating painfully studied defense with trademark thumps, taking exaggerated care not to hit in the air, and playing a 34 ball knock worth 51 that gave impetus to the first half of the Pakistan innings. And when his team came out to defend the total Afridi was all over the place from ball one, talking to whoever was bowling, casually rearranging the field his captain had set, and -- like cricket's equivalent of Kamal Hassan -- showing every sign of wanting to play all the roles himself.

In course of an earlier game, Wasim Akram produced a great commentary moment when Nasser Hussain asked him how Pakistanis classified Afridi the bowler. "We had no idea what he was doing," Akram said. "Then we went on this tour to the West Indies, and they told us he was bowling leg spin, so we said oh, okay."

That vignette spells out the quintessential maverick, who defies classification. But on the day and in fact through this tournament, Afridi has been producing virtuoso leg spin: there is drift, loop, flight, turn, bounce and very good use of the crease; what makes the package devastating is the top spinner he bowls at speeds approaching that of his team's quicks, with no discernible change in action.

His two wickets were of the kind that would have done a Shane Warne credit. Gibbs stood at the wrong end of the track watching Afridi bowl two leg breaks of varying degrees of turn to Kallis; he then squared up to the bowler and was given a lovely top spinner that landed on off stump line and drifted in just enough to beat the batsman playing for turn and hit the top of the stumps. In his next over he ripped a leg break past the bat of a bewildered AB de Villiers and then, in his own version of the fast bowler's three card trick, produced a top spinner close to the stumps and just short of length. De Villiers, the player with the highest strike rate in this tournament, was lured into the cut, and looked back to see the ball crash into the stumps off the bottom edge.

"I enjoyed batting, bowling and fielding," Afridi said at the post-match presentation while accepting his Man of the Match gong. Even filtered through a television screen, that enjoyment was infectious; on the field, its impact was epidemic with his mates catching the disease, laughingly shrugging off their occasional flubs and producing enough moments of inspiration [Mohammad Amer in the 6th over frustrating Smith with changes in length, direction and pace to the point where the Proteas skipper lost his cool, took a swipe, and saw the bowler run down the pitch, almost push his wicket-keeper out of the way and claim the catch; Umer Gul who, were most quicks are lauded for producing one yorker or two at the death, produced six each over...]

South Africa's problem, says Dileep Premachandran, is its predictability.

Players like Afridi and Yusuf Pathan will fail as often as they come up trumps, but they bring a sort of manic unpredictability to their teams that South Africa patently lack.

Australia had it with Andrew Symonds, and West Indies do with Chris Gayle, and it should come as no surprise that those outfits have brushed South Africa aside in global events in the recent past. There's little doubt now that South Africa possess the best all-round side in all forms of the game, but until they can win the matches that matter, they will never be respected or feared like Lloyd's West Indians or Ponting's Australians.

In the most unpredictable format of the game, you could argue that the law of averages caught up with them, after seven T20 wins in a row. But the greatest operate outside of such restrictions. Australia have won 29 World Cup matches in a row since 1999, and the West Indies didn't taste defeat in the competition until 1983. As good as Smith's team is, it isn't yet the real deal. You suspect that realisation will hurt even more than this defeat.

For Pakistan fans, says George Binoy, Afridi's record doesn't matter -- each fresh appearance is greeted with a roar fuelled in equal parts by anticipation and hope.

Pakistan and Afridi supporters always hope that it will come from him. They roar him to the crease, brimming with optimism, hoping he will destroy the opposition with his recklessly cavalier approach. Thousands of fans celebrated his arrival at the crease at Trent Bridge after Pakistan had lost Shahzaib Hasan in the second over.

Did they know that Afridi's last half-century, in any format of the game, came 28 innings ago, against Zimbabwe at Multan in 2008? And the one before that was 19 innings earlier, against Sri Lanka in Abu Dhabi in 2007? It didn't matter, for when it comes to Afridi, there's always reason to hope. He'll disappoint more often than not, but his successes are so spectacular that it's worth the heartbreaks.

Kamran Abbasi on what it all means:

Yet Younis has made his own luck. He has encouraged a determined and aggressive attitude, something that caught South Africa off guard. In the past, Pakistan have struggled against South Africa, largely because Pakistan have been mentally beaten before a ball has been bowled. This may be only Twenty20 but Pakistan's attitude made a palpable difference.

Behind his smiles, Younis is determined to win this World Cup for his country and especially for his embattled North West region. He and his team can hold their heads high. They have made hundreds of millions of their fellows very proud. A semi-final berth was a pleasant surprise, a final appearance is beyond expectations.

This is a sweet moment for Pakistan's long-suffering fans, who passionately follow a team that often produces frustration but sometimes conjures magic. Nobody swings more sharply between frustration and magic than Afridi. He epitomises Pakistan cricket.

Match previews [and Cricinfo is the only site doing it] tend to be somewhat perfunctory affairs done to a prefabricated template: set it up by talking of the states, look for interesting personal contests, round the whole thing off with relevant stats. Which is how it will be if you have to do a dozen of these a week.

And then someone like Osman Samiuddin comes along, and frames a cricket match against a larger backdrop. Here's his take on the first semifinal, which he sets up as a clash of machine-like consistency versus unpredictable flair. Sampler:

The whole machinery is intimidating, determined to iron out all kinks, the mission pre-programmed; with seven consecutive wins in this format, they have apparently also taken the inherent unpredictability of this format out of the equation. They are well-trained, well-oiled, and their psychologist talks about 120 contests and of processes over outcomes and how choking is not really an issue anymore. They win even warm-up matches and the dead games because every game counts. They are cricket's future.

Pakistan are the past. They are wholly dysfunctional, but just about getting along, though unsure where they are going. They don't control their extras, they don't run the singles hard and they field as if it were still the 60s. They are least bothered about erasing the flaws because any win will be in spite of them. They did hire a psychologist though, and you can only imagine what those sessions were like and how much they actually talked about sport and cricket. There are permanent mutterings of serious rifts. They may not bat, bowl or field well all the time, but sometimes, they do what can only be described as a 'Pakistan': that is, they bowl, bat or field spectacularly, briefly, to change the outcome of matches. You cannot plan or account for this as an opponent because Pakistan themselves don't plan or account for it.

Full-time neurologist and part-time cricket writer Saad Shafqat gets inside the skull of Younis Khan, and Kamran Abbasi writes of what 'just a game' can in reality mean for Pakistan cricket:

Win or lose, I want to see Pakistan play with passion and panache. In a few games of Twenty20, Younis Khan's team have reminded the world why Pakistan cricket is an essential, thrilling, and fascinating ingredient in our international game.

Win or lose, Pakistanis around the world have held their heads up high for a couple of weeks. "Proud to be Pakistani" shirts have made a reappearance. The Pakistani flag is once again associated with sporting performances that bring joy rather than the fear of international terrorism.

Win or lose, when people tell you that cricket is merely a sport, please tell them that for Pakistan this mere sport is a symbol of hope, a vibrant and pulsating connection with the international community.

No wonder Younis Khan chooses to smile. The enormity of his burden might otherwise crush him.

Me, I'm looking ahead to a good game of cricket -- and on balance, I think chances are good we'll get a cracker.

“John Buchanan has informed Knight Riders that despite his hard work over the past two seasons, he has not achieved everything that he set out to and has not been able take the franchise into the future as per his vision for this team. We have amicably agreed that Knight Riders will release him from his contract with immediate effect,” said Jay Mehta, co-owner of the Kolkata Knight Riders.“I would like to state that John is a great coach. He had a vision for Knight Riders and did not waver from this vision. Unfortunately, it has not brought the results that are so necessary to this franchise.”

It is now official -- Buchanan and KKR have parted ways, per a press release from the franchise that just landed in my inbox.

“Obviously, I am very disappointed in not being able to continue with the Knight Riders and complete the work I started some 18 months. I think we have the makings of a very good IPL franchise, and the foundations are there for 2010. I would like to thank everyone who supported me at Knight Riders, and I wish the team every success in 2010”, said John Buchanan.

The decision, according to KKR's PR, was taken because the franchise has a vision and an intent for the future, and John doesn't fit into it.

While the 2009 IPL season was an exciting and successful event, the Kolkata Knight Riders regretfully did not achieve what was required of them during the tournament, failing to fulfill both their own and their fans’ expectations.

The Knight Riders management and owners have reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of the team with all parties involved and are proactively looking for a new approach to ensure Knight Riders are well prepared for the 2010 season of IPL and beyond. As a part of this exercise, Knight Riders have consulted with John Buchanan to discuss a new approach. John, however, feels that his vision and direction for the team that he wishes to take are no longer aligned to those of the owners and franchise management, and as such he has decided to return to his coaching and corporate consulting work through his company, Buchanan Success Coaching.

That is the first, but by no means the last -- stand by for a spate of goodbyes as KKR's support staff gets decimated re-jigged for a post-Buchanan world.