Mike Selvey on the Pakistani whose sleight of bowling hand
delivered magic and trapped a hundred batsmen leg-before
It must have been late August 11 years ago when Wasim Akram sent down what remains the most amazing delivery I have witnessed in half a century of watching and playing cricket. I say witnessed but that would be overstating things, rather like saying we have seen with our own eyes the illusionist David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear.
What the Test-match crowd at The Oval that day saw – or we thought we saw – defeated the naked eye, a sleight of hand so fast that it fooled batsman, umpire, fielders, press-box, spectators and, until a replay in very slow motion revealed all, television commentators and audience as well. And from it no wicket resulted, no run accrued. The scorebook will show another dot, with perhaps a scribbled aside that Akram’s vehement lbw appeal was dismissed by Merv Kitchen or BC Cooray (I cannot for the life of me remember which) as if scarcely worthy of consideration.
Robert Croft was the England batsman and even he may not recall the incident. As was Wasim’s wont late in an innings, when the lower order was in and he was striving to finish things off and get back to the dressing room, he was pitter-pattering menacingly in from round the wicket to the right-hander, intent on hooping the ball into hapless leaden feet at a pace hovering around the 90s. At this stage in the innings there was reverse swing too and no bowler was better at exploiting it.
The sinuous delivery defeated not
just the batsman but the eye
and reflex of the umpire
This one went too much, though, we all saw that. From the hand it was directed at leg stump but swung further towards the leg side and on the full too. Croft saw runs, shifted his weight on to his front foot planted just in front of the crease and shaped to leg-glance an easy boundary. He missed, the ball struck his pad on the full halfway between instep and knee roll, Wasim roared and knowingly we chuckled at the impudence of such a frivolous appeal.
What followed set me agape. Here was a replay intending to show the ridiculous nature of the appeal; instead it revealed a feat unparalleled in my experience. The ball left Wasim’s hand and before it was midway down the pitch, and already on a considerable angle, it began to shape further towards the leg side. Croft registered this much.
But then, in perhaps the last 15 feet of its traverse from hand to pad, the ball changed direction and began to leave the batsman, straightening down the line of the stumps until it was able to slide past the closed face of Croft’s glancing bat and cannon into his front pad bang in front of middle stump. It was as out as an lbw could possibly be but so late had the movement been, and so rapid, that this sinuous delivery had defeated not just the batsman but the eye and reflex of the umpire. Fluke? What does it matter. For the fraction of a second that this took, belief was suspended.
But that was Waz. Throughout his distinguished career the master manipulator was without question my favourite cricketer. Even as I write this there is a photograph to hand of him crouched down with an arm round our first Labrador, which we named after him. His status as the finest left-arm pace bowler of all time surely brooks no argument even in a thin field. His record in Test matches or in the varying shades of green in one-day cricket is remarkable (414 wickets in the former, 502 in the latter), the more so for a fast bowler.
For a considerable period, until the relentless number of matches played by the great spinners of the modern era saw it obliterated, the most frequent entry on a Test scorecard, aside from “run out”, was “lbw Akram”, with 119 batsmen falling in that manner. (“b Muralitharan” surpassed it, reaching 153, with “lbw Kumble” next on 141.) He and his brother-in-arms Waqar Younis formed the most prolific opening attack the game has seen, with 497 victims from matches in which they opened together, though this fails to tell the complete story: as opening bowlers they were good but with the old ball they were peerless.
His yorker
was as devastating
as any
His achievement goes beyond statistics, though, and into the realms of charisma and excitement, natural skill. He could bowl fast, nastily so, with the fastest arm in the business, a whiplash that by rights ought to have cracked as he let the ball go. But he could throttle back too, working the ball with wrist and fingers, and at his best he had a total control over length and direction. His yorker, especially that toe-cruncher from round the wicket, was as devastating as any.
Put simply he could do things with the ball, old or new (scuffed sometimes, maybe, but knowing how to use it to best advantage was still a skill in its own right), of which no one else was capable. He could reverse-swing both ways (even in the same delivery, as we have seen) and few have been able to do that. At Melbourne in the World Cup final of 1992 he knocked the stuffing out of England with successive deliveries, naturally from around the wicket. The first, to Allan Lamb, snaked away and bowled him off-stump outside his bat. The next, to Chris Lewis, careered inside a probing blade and took middle. Wasim, his lime-green shirt fluorescent under the lights, screamed and danced his adrenal celebrations. It was spectacular, the mark of genius.
MIKE SELVEY played three Tests for England and is cricket correspondent of The Guardian