One day, many years ago, on a street in Islamabad, I ran into bowl. Just as I was getting into my delivery stride, it hit me that I had no idea what to do next.
The coordination between my right and left legs, as I entered the action, had vanished.
Subsequently, the arms, shoulders and hips also went.
For no known reason, I had completely lost my action. It was like running off a cliff and losing the feeling of ground beneath you, or suddenly forgetting a language you have been speaking all your life.
The more I tried, the more I could not recall how or what my action had been. This being the entirely recreational pursuits of a 13-year-old boy, on a street with a taped-up tennis ball, it made no difference to the Earth’s rotations.
Over the next few days I had to re-learn and put together a new action, walking in step by step and bringing my left arm up and right arm over in a new formation.
I began bowling again eventually and had an eminently respectable time in non-serious club cricket and numerous tape-ball pick-up games. But I never felt entirely grooved in my reworked action. Though my original action is all but a figment of my imagination, I remember it being smoother, with a higher leap and, naturally, more pace.
This moment came back when Steven Finn ran into bowl again for England this month. Finn is an elite, professional athlete, a universe removed from my own childhood sports fumbling.
Yet at the same time as it gladdens the senses to see him back, it is worth wondering how he feels right now, every time he runs into bowl. Finn’s problems seemed acutely complicated when he returned home from England’s terrible Ashes tour at the end of 2013.
There was no agreement on what had gone so wrong.
He was seen in nets one day walking through his action, as if he had forgotten it and was trying to remember it.
Angus Fraser, the former England fast bowler and director at Finn’s county Middlesex, initially thought it was burnout of some kind. Finn, he said, had just stopped loving bowling.
Later, when he worked with Finn last summer on his rehabilitation, Fraser concluded that a technical glitch had crept in.
Likely this had resulted from Finn shortening his run-up, which had been done to resolve a quirk that caused him to often hit the non-striker’s stumps with his right hand as he ran into bowl. So often did it happen the ICC were forced to legislate, deeming it a no-ball.
People muttered that Finn had been over-coached and that conflicting advice had resulted in a meltdown.
He was turned into another fallout of England’s decaying and overbearing micromanagement. Here was a prodigiously and naturally gifted young man who was turned into an automaton.
In hindsight, the last days of Andy Flower’s regime do not have much, if anything, to recommend it.
There is maybe an atom of truth to this. Certainly a common complaint of the modern cricketer is that he is over-coached, and thus cricket is over-complicated.
Last summer, appearing on a Sky Masterclass session on fast bowling, Wasim Akram talked through the process of his run-up. It was simple, he said: Count 17 steps back from the crease and bingo. He could not understand why fast bowlers today took such pains to precisely measure their run-ups, using tape measures and placing various markers along the way.
Akram’s deconstruction is seductive. He is Akram after all. But it is also unreasonable to imagine that England’s management would have done anything to fail Finn.
Nobody did and nobody would. However, the bottom line remained that if Finn had not forgotten how to bowl, he had forgotten that which made him such an exciting prospect. With Fraser, he put his action back together bit by bit, step by step.
He has had success on his return, and on numbers he is still the Finn of old – he ended the tri-series as the second-highest wicket-taker with a great strike rate, although maybe a little more expensive than England would like.
Maybe there also had been just a little tentativeness, a little hesitancy. The action looked fine and the bounce was there, but the pace was down.
He said that was deliberate and would come with more confidence. To gain confidence he cannot think about what would happen if he again starts to hit the stumps while running in or concern himself with whether his action feels like it did in 2012.
Although, back then, to see him bowl was to wonder not if but when he would become a great fast bowler.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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