Mohd Asif ready to rise above dope scandal

It hasn’t been more than a few weeks since it was thought that a bright young career in international cricket had come to an end — disgraced by a doping scandal.

It hasn’t been more than a few weeks since it was thought that a bright young career in international cricket had come to an end — disgraced by a doping scandal. Even as the Pakistan Cricket Board was busy ticking off Mohammad Asif’s name from the list of World Cup probables, we thought here was an extremely gifted talent gone wasted, perhaps for careless or even deliberate reasons.

Why he tested positive will always remain a mystery which even Asif wouldn’t like to delve into, but there has been a constructive side to all of it too, which this 24-year-old is now looking at. Sitting in his hotel room in Chennai, the tall talent is game for everything in cricket but that controversy. “The last eight months have been dreadful enough,” he said. “Ask me about my bowling, anything on it.”

Former Pakistani greats like Waqar Younis and Aaquib Javed see him as one of their kind or even better. The late Bob Woolmer reckoned him as the bowler to look out for.

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Asif belongs to the school of taped-ball bowlers who learnt his tricks with a natural ability to learn very fast. “That is the most important thing about me. I can pick things up very fast. I am a good learner and have the ability to improve on what I get to see and do,” he said, his confidence now at an all-time high since that recent fall from glory.

There are few things about him that he strongly believes are unquestionable — his measure of the line and length when he runs in to bowl, his “intuitions” about whether it’s going to be a good or a bad day for him, his understanding of Irfan Pathan’s long-standing misery and the classic art of getting Virender Sehwag out.

“Don’t quote me,” he quipped, after getting started about his views on Pathan’s struggle. But we will because what Asif states is something that majority of Pathan fans strongly believe in. “You don’t go looking for advice when you know you’re good. People are free to give advice, they’ll keep doing that. But when you’re bowling well, you just need to bowl, try and take wickets, not advice,” he said. He added: “It’s only when you’re down and out and have no clue that you go and speak to experts. Not when you are your team’s best bowler.”

Asked whether Asif believed he could get Sehwag’s wicket every time he walked out to bat, he said: “We keep teasing Sehwag all the time arrre tere to pair hi nahi hilte, tu kya run banayga? (Your feet don’t move, how will you score runs?). It’ll never work against smart bowlers.”

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Claiming that he is developing a few new tricks, he said: “You’re from India, how can I tell you?”

Asif is determined to succeed, go along the lines of Akram and Waqar and be remembered as another great from Pakistan. “I have a very good understanding of the swing, I can do it both ways,” he boasted, though truthfully. There is no doubting Asif’s talent. Given his recent trauma with doping scandals, there’s also no doubting that he’s a changed man.