Memory can be such a drag. Even those who do not retain especially well, some moments, some images, are impossible to vanish away. And they do get stuck inside there, refusing to move illuminating that past but inevitably colouring the imminent and the future.
See Mitchell Johnson for instance, cleaned up second ball after lunch on the first day of a Test at Headingley six years ago. How can you possibly forget that ball?
Speared in towards his pads, destined to go further down that side until the seam and shine and something in the air maybe swung it away – and it was more than just swing, this was a swoosh – to take Johnson’s off-stump.
Johnson’s attempted shot enhanced the entire tapestry, an elegant, checked clip, perhaps aimed through midwicket. Had he struck it, it would have fairly sped away to the fence, a wonder of timing.
So you remember that ball, or maybe other balls of that ilk. Like the one to Shane Watson a Test earlier at Lord’s, one that dismissed him twice in one ball – he was stone-dead leg-before before the ball somehow found a way to actually hit the stumps.
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That was his favourite at the time. And it was the cursed memory of deliveries such as those that refused to go away as the deliverer of those balls, Mohammed Amir, came in to bowl his first delivery in Test cricket at Lord’s on Friday, over 2,000 days after he bowled his last delivery in Test cricket, also at Lord’s but on a Saturday.
It was impossible to un-remember those balls and not only un-remember them but to also not expect similar ones as he ran in to bowl. This is the thing about memory – it distorts reality.
That first ball was pretty meh, shorter than the lengths with which Amir really flourishes. Maybe it swung a little but not in a way to lodge itself in the brain. Alastair Cook, bless him, doused the occasion by playing an utterly Alastair Cook shot at it, an ugly little poke out to the off-side for a single.
This was reality, unattractive, un-swinging, unspectacular and very real. What we do forget is the thousands of deliveries that go into making that one magic ball, which is the one that gets the airtime, amplified by platforms such as Youtube.
The first over was not bad though here again the memory – Amir Mark I, let’s call him, took wickets in first overs of games an uncanny number of times. His sharpness from the very start of a game was part of what made him so exciting, that a young kid could be so switched on, so game-ready, from first ball to last.
Instead Rahat Ali, one of a few left-arm pacers who have operated in the long shadow of Amir’s exile, took a wicket in his first over, the next over. And that over really was switched on, attacking Alex Hales straight, setting him up all the while for the last ball, just a little wider but with the same shape.
But through that first spell of Amir’s there was plenty of evidence that in his outer shell at least, he is still plenty similar to that first Amir. The brain figured soon that the lack of swing would have to be compensated by generally tighter bowling. Inside that shell he cannot be the same, not anymore and it may be that which ultimately settles how he goes.
There was evidence of some rust, too, not a lack of skills or even physical capacity but perhaps only the groove that comes from having done this day in, day out. He has not.
In a way it was good he did not make a dream comeback. Good that the day was a hard slog with the disappointments of a couple of dropped chances. Life is not a memory-generated portal. It is real and it is hard.
It was when he had to leave it and it still is now.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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