Pakistan’s first Test in South Africa, in January 1995, was woeful. The team was split in all kinds of ways, personal, selfish ambitions melding with corruption. They lost by 324 runs, their fourth-heaviest Test defeat by runs.
Such was their dysfunction that Aamer Nazir was playing the Test. He did not know he had been selected into the playing XI because he was on a plane over to Johannesburg from Pakistan at the time the management decided to pick him.
He landed at the airport an hour before the Test began and turned up on the field half-hour after the Test began, Pakistan having been put into bowl. He came on to some teammates he barely knew, had to bowl pretty soon, broke down with cramp in his seventh over, returned after tea to dismiss Jonty Rhodes and David Richardson in successive deliveries and broke down again.
He finished with three wickets and nine no-balls in the Test. The no-balls is a bit of a red herring because it is a problem Nazir had through his career, jet-lagged or not. He did not actually bowl badly in that Test though he went for runs.
See more from Osman Samiuddin:
• With returns of Mohammed Amir and Yasir Shah, Pakistan can end 20-year drought in England
• Dunga sacked (again) and Brazil national team haunted by ghosts of glorious past
He was dropped for the next Test, which Pakistan lost to Zimbabwe, but returned for the next two, taking eight wickets in the final one to help Pakistan win the Test and series. All this happened within one month.
The point to this tale about Nazir, an amiable fast bowler able to generate big, booming reverse is the lack of fuss with which he played that Test and the entire tour. It seemed such a natural thing to do in theory, if not in practice: get on plane, get off plane, get on field, bowl. Ultimately in this instance, it did pay off, even if briefly.
To recount it now is only as a non-judgemental contrast to the tortures of Steven Finn this summer. Has there been such a gifted fast bowler who has found the act of bowling fast such a mental torture as Finn?
This summer, for two Tests against Sri Lanka, the Englishman again looked like he has so often, and so bewilderingly: at a loss as to how best to engineer the wonderful physical gifts he possesses to the task of bowling fast and fine.
His run-up was laboured. The pace was down. The lengths were scattered, the lines drifting here, then there. Occasionally he produced the ball only he can, though by the time he bowled at Lord’s in the final Test he had at least rediscovered some of whatever it was that had gone missing for him. He did not bowl badly per se, just not as well as might be expected of him.
But this is what happens with Finn. He is unable to snap out of the hellish cycle he is trapped in whereby he cannot get outside of himself and understand how good he really is, or how naturally bowling should come to him.
It is a cycle in which he wants to hear more advice while also understanding that it is too much advice that has, potentially, placed him in this quandary in the first place; a cursed cycle in which he looks good as an out-and-out fast bowler but also as one who is less than express but can extract seam, even some swing.
It is a cycle which leads to only one real question: Will Finn’s entire career play out within this loop, or will he one day snap out of it and become the bowler hidden deep, deep inside him, a bowler that, ultimately, only Finn himself can recognise.
Maybe, like Nazir that day, what he actually needs is to stop thinking about it so much and just do it.
**************************************************************************
Last week
ODI tri-series in West Indies
• Australia beat West Indies by 6 wickets
• West Indies beat South Africa by 100 runs
India tour of Zimbabwe
• 2nd T20 – India beat Zimbabwe by 10 wickets
• 3rd T20 – India beat Zimbabwe by 3 runs
Sri Lanka tour of England
• 1st ODI – Match tied
• 2nd ODI – England beat Sri Lanka by 10 wickets
This week
Sri Lanka tour of England
• 4th ODI (Wednesday)
• 5th ODI (Saturday)
Match-up of the week
A rare quiet week in the international calendar with only the two ODIs between England and Sri Lanka to look forward to; which must mean, of course, that a blingy, franchise Twenty20 league is about to start. It is, and the Indian Premier League aside, the Caribbean Premier League is the blingiest of them all. The game’s biggest stars are all present as action gets underway from Wednesday. This season look out for a potentially significant mid-league jaunt to the US market.
Stat of the week
53.64
Love him or loathe him, it is impossible to deny the value of Marlon Samuels as an ODI batsman over the past three years. This is how much he has averaged in that period, seventh highest of any batsman. His sixth hundred in that period – against Australia last week – took him past 5,000 ODI runs.
Follow us on Twitter @NatSportUAE
Like us on Facebook at facebook.com/TheNationalSport
