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Journalism of Courage
Weekends are normally busy for club cricketers and, on this Friday night, 16-year-old Pervez Haider is doing his warm-up at the dinner table. Stacked up are five Afghani naans and a bowlful of meat read beef. 8216;8216;Aadha kilo hai,8217;8217; he says. 8216;8216;I am a fast bowler and I need taakat to bowl. If you can8217;t have a good diet, how can you bowl fast?8217;8217;
What about height, one asks, isn8217;t that also required Pervez is just a little over five feet tall. He takes a moment8217;s break from his food, looks up and shoots back, 8216;8216;Haven8217;t you seen Mohammad Sami? He8217;s not tall, is he?8217;8217;
Touche. In Pakistan, fast bowlers come in all sizes; the tall and broad Shoaib Akhtar, the almost delicate Mohammad Sami. For every stocky Rana Naved-ul Hasan there8217;s a wiry Mohammad Asif or Umar Gul also. They just have a natural appetite which gives them the thrust at the crease and the explosive power at the time of releasing the ball.
There8217;s no specific place where fast bowlers are produced; it could be anywhere and everywhere; at the home of the Rawalpindi Express, it could be the cricket ground near Sadan Mall Road. The wicket is no criterion; the spinners can take advantage of that later, but every new ball bowler is here to bowl quick.
At the end of the day, it8217;s not just the wickets that count, but the 8216;carry8217; you generate through the entire spell. There8217;s no pressure to keep a line or length to restrain the batsman; 8216;have ball, bowl fast,8217; is the general credo.
Every time, all the time.
The Indian players won8217;t admit it but even the nets bowlers at Peshawar and Pindi had their batsmen in a spot of bother. 8216;8216;I took some junior members of the team for a net session8217;8217;, said team manager Raj Singh Dungarpur. 8216;8216;From whatever I could judge, these bowlers are just as quick as some of the present crop in the team. I8217;m sure the players realized it.8217;8217;
DOWN in Colombo, the heirs of Shoaib and Sami have been strutting their stuff at the Under-19 World Cup. Akhtar Ayub see story alongside was man of the match in Pakistan8217;s first game; on Friday, Anwar Ali Khan picked up five quick wickets to destroy New Zealand.
Both come from the tape-ball school of cricket which not only gives them speed the ball is light so must be hurled with greater force but also swing. 8216;8216;Chalaak bowlers swing kar lete hain8217;8217;, says Pakistan U-19 captain Sarfaraz Ahmed. Anwar demonstrates what his skipper means; moving his bent index finger on the imaginary ball in another hand he bursts out laughing without uttering the 8216;T8217; word.
But Anwar says he doesn8217;t need to doctor the ball as he has a formidable legit arsenal. 8216;8216;I have a natural in-swinger got three with that on Friday, out-swinger, the yorker and the slower one,8217;8217; he says.
The outside world may see an anomaly in the fact that there aren8217;t many finishing school here, that most of the young talent is not introduced to formal training early on. To Pakistan, it8217;s a blessing in disguise. Mohammad Asif wasn8217;t schooled in the finer aspects of fast bowling 8212; the swing or the cutters 8212; till he was in reckoning for the national side and his non-bowling arm still falls sideways at the point of delivery but it8217;s not stopped him from picking up wickets.
In India, it works the other way around. Bowlers are first taught to maintain line and length, coaches ask them to pitch the ball up and try and swing the new ball and harp on the importance of a good action. The principle is to cut down on speed and increase players8217; career spans. The BCCI has comprehensive talent hunting schemes but most of it goes through respective associations and that tends to weed out 8216;natural cricketers8217;.
AND the one area where Pakistan easily outscores India is in providing role models for young pacers. Sarfaraz Nawaz, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis8230;
You might have thought that, for the current crop of teenagers, hero-worship begins and ends with Shoaib Akhtar. Not so. True, he is the focal point of attention, has been so ever since Pakistan defeated India in the Asian Test Championship at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata.
But role model? Not quite.
Sample this: A group of youngsters were playing in a tournament organized by shopkeepers of Lahore8217;s Liberty Market around the same time as India8217;s Test there last month. The prize: 1000 Pakistani Rupees for the team that won and Rs 150 for the best individual performances.
Waheed Khan was adjudged the best bowler for his seven-wicket haul in the tournament and he admits to a fascination for Shoaib8217;s speed. But the fascination ends there. 8216;8216;His action may have been cleared but it isn8217;t one to watch and learn from. He is arrogant, he cannot deliver when he is expected to, one cannot see any cricketing acumen in him.8217;8217;
Additional reporting by K Shriniwas Rao and Sandeep Dwivedi
