Osman Samiuddin: Pakistan's cricket writing genius who transforms sport into poetry

 JournalismPakistan.com |  Published last month |  Dr. Nauman Niaz (TI)

ISLAMABAD — To the nation, Osman Samiuddin is the foremost cricket writer and voice of his generation; to those who know him closely, he is also a friend who strives to bequeath not only his lifelong love of the game but its music, its melancholy, its myths.

The Literary Master of Cricket Writing

Osman Samiuddin lives a life not only written in print but sung in cadence. As Sir Garfield Sobers once remarked of another cricketing correspondent: 'A great writer, a great man, a great friend to cricket.' Such words might stand now as Osman's epitaph too, though he still breathes, still writes, still shapes the imagination of the game.

As I contemplate, The Life of Osman Samiuddin, a recount of a man who turns cricket's dust into starlight, who writes of matches as though they were sagas of Homeric length, and of players as though they were painted figures in epic murals. From childhood, Osman's romance with the game grows unbroken. As a boy, he watched not just matches, but the very light in which cricket is played, the gloaming across Karachi grounds, the hush before a bowler runs in, the sudden applause that lifts like a psalm. He fell hopelessly in love, as only a teenager could, and never once strayed.

Decades of Distinguished Cricket Journalism

Through the decades, his writings have become his instrument. Millions of words, perhaps more, have poured from him, columns, essays, an outstanding book, conversations, all of them coloured with the lyricism of a writer who refuses to treat cricket as just sport. A bestseller already on his shelf, and countless hours of writing and reflection have made him 'one of the top cricket writers of his age.' He is not without his critics, nor has he shied from controversy. Where others dodge, Osman leans in, writing with candour and courage. He confronts cricket's hypocrisies, the silences on apartheid, the cruelties of politics, tand he banalities of modernity, and his words carry the weight of conviction.

Rumours and shadows may trail him, as they trail any man of prominence, yet Osman remains undeterred, never hiding from controversy, never cloaking truth. He has written on Pakistan with affection yet with an honesty that cuts through sentiment, and in doing so, he has invited both ire and reverence.

The Musical Voice Behind Cricket's Greatest Stories

Those who sit with him over a cup of tea know another Osman, the one whose eyes glint with mischief, whose voice, rich and treacly, is as memorable as his prose. His sentences may not chase lyricism in the Arlott or a Sipra mould, but his passages remain unmistakable. As I once observed of prose stylists: the felicities of phrase may belong to others, but the resonance belongs to him alone.

His voice, whether on page or in conversation, is musical, produced like a liturgy, rolling with ecclesiastical overtones, compelling to the ear. A friend once remarked, on hearing Osman's vowels for the first time, that they recalled 'a great uncle with a love for gentleman's relish.' If words may be likened to instruments, then this is a cello: sonorous, grave, capable of sudden lyric flight.

An Edwardian Writer in a Modern World

Like Pavarotti on stage, Osman descends upon cricket grounds with his entourage of opinions, Corinthian ideals, and a book to celebrate. Observers speak of his pomposity, yet those who know him insist there is nothing pompous about him. He quarrels, yes, at times fiercely, always with humour. One might imagine Osman, in his great pronouncements, mistaken for a pontiff. Osman Samiuddin remains what cricket rarely breeds: a writer who has caught its heartbeat and held it long enough for others to hear. A great writer, a great man, and above all, a great friend to cricket.

Some writers are born at their appointed hour, stepping neatly into the currents of their age, finding the waters that will carry them along. And then there are others who, by some trick of cosmic mischief, are cast ashore in the wrong era, left to make their way against the grain of time, their genius more native to another epoch. Osman Samiuddin belongs emphatically to the second. He is a writer of Edwardian constitution and Edwardian cadence, born instead into a century of fractured attention, twenty-four-hour feeds, and the short breath of news cycles. Yet his gift is so true that it withstands the insult of misplacement; indeed, it flourishes despite it.

The Natural Born Cricket Storyteller

A generation after us began with him. Younger, more assured, more competent in his grasp of both history and moment, Osman wrote as if cricket had been waiting all along for his arrival with a laptop in hand. From the beginning, one sensed he was not learning how to write: he was only practising something already within him. The cadences seemed to come as naturally as sight or breath. His sentences fell into place with the rhythm of inevitability, like the ball of a great bowler homing to its mark, or like music returning always to its theme.

And yet, Osman was not just lyrical. He belongs to that rare fraternity who could, in the same breath, conjure poetry and cut through with analysis. For this, he stands apart. Many writers dress the game in language, some in finery so excessive the cricketer himself is lost beneath the cloth. Others pare down so completely that the human is removed, replaced by table and figure. Osman joined the two. He has given us cricket as literature and as fact, as dream and as diagnosis. He showed us the colours and the contours, the music and the numbers. He doesn't so much embellish cricket as reveal it.

Cricket as Religion: The Sacred Calling of Writing

From his earliest pieces, one could see that Osman's true religion was writing. Journalism, he once confessed, he followed as one follows a calling, second only to faith itself. There was never any doubt about vocation. He wrote not to make a living but because he could not do otherwise. Words arrived at him the way sunlight fills a room: naturally, unstoppably.

His is not the startling language of flamboyant invention; he does not need gimmick or ornament. His brilliance lies in resonance. He can write of the most ordinary cricketing day, a Quaid-i-Azam match played before empty stands in Sialkot, or a dreary Test in Dubai, and make it shimmer with human depth, with history, with the sense of belonging to something greater. For Osman, no match is ever just a match. It is an entry into the annals of culture, society, and memory.

The Timeless Writer in an Impatient Age

Thus, his place, strangely, seems not to be our own world at all. He should have been a star of Edwardian prose, exchanging notes with R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, sitting with Ashley Cooper in the pavilion, nodding with delight at John Arlott's turn of phrase. He would have matched Jim Swanton for discipline, Christopher Martin-Jenkins for fluency. One imagines those men reading him with admiration, as though they had found in him a younger colleague carrying their flame.

To read Osman Samiuddin is to realise how misplaced he is in our impatient century. Here is a writer who sees cricket as civilisation. He treats it as music treats silence: as a way of shaping time, of giving meaning to what might otherwise slip away. His sentences belong not to the scrolling feed but to the oak-panelled library. His cadences echo not the commentary box so much as the essay of John Arlott, the memoir of Neville Cardus.

And yet, far from being a relic, Osman's misplacement is the secret of his force. He writes Edwardian literature in a post-modern world. He offers the long view in an age obsessed with instant results. He provides the timeless when the temporary is worshipped. That is why he matters.

The Perfect Fusion of Poetry and Analysis

At the heart of Osman's gift lies his style. Lyrical, evocative, literary, his prose carries a cadence which seems at times like music transposed into words. He has never feared to let the sentence breathe, to let the metaphor wander into imagination. But he is not indulgent. Always, the lyric is espoused to the idea, the beauty to the point. At times, he writes opinion with the sharpness of steel. He is not a coward with words. Fearless, he addresses cricket's hypocrisies, the silence on match-fixing, the corruption of boards, and the politics that taint the game. And yet, even his anger carries lyricism. He does not descend to the vulgar. His indignation is noble, eloquent, almost poetic. The best of his pieces carry passion that syncs seamlessly with language. He writes as though words are not only vehicles of meaning but emotional resonances, vibrating with the sentiment they carry.

What makes him elite is the rare fusion of the literary and the analytical. He belongs unquestionably to the higher literary sphere: his sentences could be read aloud as poetry. But he also possesses an analytical nous that elevates him beyond the dreamers. He knows the game's details, its statistics, its data. He can explain why a field setting matters, why a bowler's wrist position is decisive, and why a policy decision within a cricket board will ripple into the dressing-room. He analyses with the precision of a surgeon, then describes with the sweep of a poet.

Standing Among Cricket's Literary Giants

This fusion places him in the company of Gideon Haigh, perhaps the most formidable cricket mind of our era. Osman stands alongside him, shoulder to shoulder with Peter Roebuck (now deceased), Derek Pringle, Simon Hughes, and India's Sharda Ugra. To me, he is at par with them all. His contemporaries are not just colleagues but peers, equals in a shared lineage of cricket's literature. If journalism is second only to faith for Osman, then his essays are his psalms. He writes not to inform alone, but to praise, to mourn, to question. He writes as others pray, with urgency, with devotion. Cricket is never trivial to him; it is always essential. Through cricket, he tells us about ourselves: our frailties, our ambitions, our absurdities.

Read him on Pakistan, and you find not just commentary on a match but a portrait of a people, chaotic, brilliant, fragile, gifted, self-destructive, resilient. Read him on India, and you sense the pulse of a civilisation harnessed to cricket's strange chariot. Read him on the West Indies, and you hear the rhythm of a people whose music is inseparable from the game. His journalism is anthropology in disguise.

The Legacy of Cricket's Literary Master

What would John Arlott have said of Osman? Perhaps that here was a younger voice carrying forward the lyric, reminding the world that cricket must be written in prose as beautiful as the game itself. Jim Swanton, ever the Corinthian, might have approved of Osman's discipline, his refusal to pander, his devotion to seriousness. Robertson-Glasgow, who loved cricket for its absurdities, would have smiled at Osman's gift for humour amid tragedy. And Neville Cardus himself, had he lived to hear Osman's voice, might have recognised a kinship: the same sense that cricket is not only about play but about life itself, its hopes, despairs, its music and its silences.

To our generation, Osman made the difference. He showed that writing about cricket could still be literature. He restored faith to those of us who feared that the game had been lost to jargon, to punditry, to the dismal reduction of analysis. He wrote with cadence at a time when cadence was unfashionable. He reminded us that prose could still sing. And he did so without startling effort. The language came naturally to him, as if it had been waiting for him before he was born. His brilliance was not manufactured but organic. His words had the inevitability of nature, like the sea's waves, like a bird's flight.

A Global Voice Rooted in Pakistani Cricket

Osman is not of our time, but he is for all time. I re-emphasize, he should have been born into the Edwardian age, feted in London's cricketing salons, quoted by captains and critics. But perhaps it is better this way. In being misplaced, he shows us what we lack, what we have lost, what we must remember. A writer born to write. A writer who makes a difference not by fireworks but by steady brilliance. When the history of cricket writing is told, his name will not be absent. He will be remembered as one who kept alive the spirit of Neville Cardus in a world that had forgotten music. His words will be read long after matches have faded, long after boards have dissolved, long after statistics have been superseded. For literature endures where everything else perishes. And Osman Samiuddin is literature.

Osman stands as one of the rarest voices of his generation, a writer who has turned cricket into song and journalism into literature. For 20 years, he has wandered through the vast avenues of global media, his words finding residence in The Observer, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph in London, The Australian Age, The Indian Express, Dawn, and even the mighty columns of The Wall Street Journal. Where most would be content to scatter reports, Osman has left imprints, his sentences carrying both the weight of truth and the lift of cadence.

The Unquiet Ones: A Masterpiece of Cricket Literature

He is the author of The Unquiet Ones – A History of Pakistan Cricket, a book that not only records but interprets, does not merely list but sings. In those pages, the tumultuous story of Pakistan cricket becomes a mirror to the country itself: turbulent, brilliant, wayward, resilient. The work is more than history; it is a nation's autobiography written in the language of cricket.

But Osman's gifts are not confined to a single book. He is among the founding spirits behind The Nightwatchman and The Cricket Monthly, two long-form journals that defy the hurried appetite of the present, giving cricket back its rightful dignity of time and reflection. Such endeavours reveal his creed: journalism for him is not just a craft, it is a vocation, second only to faith itself.

From Tripoli to London: A World Citizen of Cricket

Beyond cricket's boundary, he has written of advertising and commerce, food and travel, life and its myriad digressions. He has walked the corridors of The Herald and The Review, sent dispatches on flavour and fashion, on journeys through place and memory. He has written columns for The Tribune, the local English paper twinned with the International Herald Tribune. Everywhere he has gone, he has left behind not just information but atmosphere.

Born in Tripoli, shaped by Saudi Arabia, tempered in the United Kingdom, Pakistan, and the Emirates, and now dwelling in London, Osman is a citizen of the wide world yet remains tethered by spirit to Pakistan cricket. His prose, though international in polish, is local in heart, carrying the dust of Karachi streets, the clamour of Lahore afternoons, the mutterings of Rawalpindi evenings. He admits with disarming candour that his attempts at the guitar are less successful than his daughters', but in writing, he plays chords no musician could match.

 ESPNcricinfo: The Platform for Cricket's Literary Voice

At ESPNcricinfo, where he serves as senior editor, his features are both timely and timeless, the first draft of history that somehow already feels like the last word. He has written of triumphs and despairs, of moments that made nations pause and of scandals that left them diminished. His pen has kept faith with Pakistan cricket's chaos, not condemning it to ridicule but rendering it into narrative, as one might turn storm into symphony.

The milestones of his journey are themselves a drapery of the game: watching Pakistan's 1986–87 tour of India on battered VHS tapes; the street alchemy of tape-ball cricket in Karachi; his apprenticeship under the influence of The Cricketer magazine; his first interviews, Rashid Latif newly appointed as captain, Wasim Akram already legend; covering the tours to India in 2003–04 and 2005–06; and the commission to write the definitive history of Pakistan cricket.

Chronicles of Cricket's Most Turbulent Era

He has chronicled the tumultuous years when the game staggered under its own contradictions: Inzamam's walkout, Bob Woolmer's death, the terror attack on the Sri Lankan team, the shame of spot-fixing. He has written, too, of the luminous: Fazal Mahmood's faith in destiny, Imran Khan's spell in Sydney that altered the dynamics of fast bowling, Javed Miandad's quest for 'respect', Wasim Akram's sorcery, the phenomenon of 'haal' by which Pakistan pulls victory from the jaws of despair.

Through it all, Osman writes not as a reporter but as a custodian. His sentences belong as much to literature as to journalism; they evoke Cardus, Arlott, and Glasgow, yet they also stand unmistakably his own. He is lyrical, yes, but also analytical, fearless in his opinions, fearless in his criticisms. He belongs to that rare tradition where writing does not flatter the game but enlarges it.

Critical Acclaim for The Unquiet Ones

The Unquiet Ones, published in 2014 by HarperCollins India, has already taken its place among the classics of cricket literature. Shortlisted by the Cricket Writers' Club for Book of the Year, it is both history and elegy, chronicling not only Pakistan cricket but Pakistan itself, its uncertainties, its brilliance, its sorrows, its resilience.

Osman Samiuddin's The Unquiet Ones is not just a book but a recount of transformation: the tale of how cricket in Pakistan, once an urban and exclusive indulgence, grew into a binding force for millions across a vast and restless land. The work unfolds in five movements, each containing essays that gather thirty-one voices of history. Every section begins with a match chosen as the emblem of its age, a game that serves as overture and symbol. From there, the narrative lingers upon two figures at most, players who embody their epoch, whose triumphs and tragedies inscribe the character of their times. The journey culminates in the ultimate section, covering the fraught yet luminous years between 1992 and 2014, when Pakistan cricket, chaotic and inspired, wrote its destiny on the edge of delirium.

Universal Recognition and Literary Praise

The reception of the book has been nothing short of a chorus. A reviewer for ESPNcricinfo declared it among the most authentic depictions not only of cricket but of the country itself, 'a superbly researched book,' though lamenting the silence on women's cricket. He conferred upon it a high commendation, a score of 4.5 out of 5, and urged it as 'highly recommended.'

From Wisden India came the praise of poetry. The reviewer christened it 'an ode to Pakistan cricket,' and observed that the five hundred pages amount to more than research, more than a quizzer's trove; it was, he felt, a grand tribute deserving of a title yet more august to match its scope.

The Express Tribune called it 'a triumph,' noting with awe the sheer depth of labour, 'let us call it scholarship', which underpinned its pages. From DNA India rose another accolade, praising the 'extensive research' and likening Samiuddin's effort to a craftsman compiling a century of consummate elegance: a debut yet already mature, a structure both meticulous and enthralling. In the New Statesman the judgment was unambiguous: 'magnificent, as stand-alone history of Pakistan cricket.' And from within his own homeland, Nadeem F. Paracha, cultural critic of Dawn, gave the book a more intimate benediction: 'a knowledgeable fan's history of Pakistan cricket,' at once a learned testament and 'a youthful celebration of a wildly impulsive cricketing culture.'

The Eternal Voice of Cricket Literature

Thus, the book stands not only as a record but as literature itself: at once history and elegy, analysis and art, a text that restores to Pakistan cricket its rightful dimension, untidy, mercurial, luminous, and unquiet, like the nation it mirrors. To the nation, Osman Samiuddin is the foremost cricket writer of his generation; to those who know him more closely, he is also a friend, striving, perhaps in vain, to bequeath to others the lifelong, unquenchable love of the game that governs his existence.

Voice of cricket: Osman Samiuddin lives a life of epic measure. What finer epitaph could exist? For Osman, even while living, wears that description as though it were his inheritance. His life is steeped in cricket's proportions. He is not without his critics. Some accuse him of excess lyricism, of too much colour, of sentences that linger like melodies when they might move on. But Osman's style is unmistakable. He arrives at the grounds with the air of one born to them, opinionated, Corinthian, uncompromising. Some mutter of pomposity, but those who know him understand there is nothing pompous in his nature. He feuds when he must, chuckles when he may, savours the great verbal jousts of the press box. He relishes the absurdities, the asides, the humour that cricket always yields: smoke rising in the distance and some wag murmuring that Osman has just been elected as a spiritual leader of all modern writers. A man born to write. And, above all, a great friend of cricket.

Dr. Nauman Niaz is a civil award winner (Tamagha-i-Imtiaz) in Sports Broadcasting & Journalism, and is the sports editor at JournalismPakistan.com. He is a regular cricket correspondent, having covered 54 tours and three ICC World Cups, and having written over 3500 articles. He has authored 15 books and is the official historian of Pakistan Cricket (Fluctuating Fortunes IV Volumes - 2005). His signature show, Game On Hai, has been the highest in ratings and acclaim.