Akram: The saga of swing, pain and sheer genius

Imagine you wake up one day to find yourself standing with a bat smack in the middle of a game of Test cricket. Oh well, you shrug, and get ready to face the next ball. There’s a 50,000 strong crowd thirsting for your wicket, or even worse, your blood. The heat is unbelievable, the ground as hard as granite.

Thirty yards away, Wasim Akram has the ball. Now you know why there was all that talk of blood.

Before you can say ‘Good God’, Akram’s charging at you like an express train on Red Bull. The left-arm is hidden from you, so you can never really catch the point of release. Faster and faster he gets until the ball is suddenly a blur, doing well over 90 miles an hour. It isn’t one of them headhunting bouncers, but that is hardly a relief. This one comes in full; the quintessential left-arm scorcher that’s destined to swing away from the right-hander….or is it?

If by some miracle you’ve still got your eyes on the ball, good sense would tell you to either get on the front foot, or leave it be if only to be safe. Milliseconds later, the ball slaps the ground, and turns into you at incredible speed. No way in hell you’re surviving this if you hadn’t been expecting it months in advance.

Welcome to subcontinental cricket of the 90s.

Reverse swing and its greatest champion had a romance that provided the game of cricket with doorways to new worlds. Pakistan had constantly intrigued opposition teams with its bowlers’ ‘late-swinging’ deliveries ever since Sarfraz Nawaz murdered an entire Australian batting line-up in a Test match in 1979. For the next decade, reverse swing was Pakistan cricket’s best kept secret. Nawaz passed on the knowledge to the fiery Imran Khan, who taught it to his protégé. Cricket has never been the same since.

Akram redefined the art of swing bowling, showing that it’s as much about the bowler as it is about aerodynamics. In an era when captains scrambled to use up the quicks in their team before the ball got old, the genius of Akram made the final overs of a match the most lethal ones for batsmen. Mark Waugh once remarked, “Akram can bowl anything and everything…he could land four balls on the same spot in an over and do four different things with it.” This was after the spell of bone-crunchers Akram hurled at the former’s sibling in a post-lunch session of a Test match at Rawalpindi. “The quickest, meanest spell I’ve ever faced,” Steve Waugh concurred, much later.

Akram broke through at a time when fast bowling was synonymous with names such as Alan Donald, Courtney Walsh, Curtly Ambrose, Glenn McGrath and compatriot Waqar Younis. In the eight years between 1990 and 1997, Akram was the single greatest Test bowler around, least of all not on paper. In 48 matches, he hauled 240 wickets at an outstanding average of 20. This included 16 five-wicket – four of them hat-tricks – and 3 ten-wicket kills. He grabbed 12 Man of the Match awards in the period – at an incredible rate of one every four matches. 53% of his wickets were estimated to be bowled or lbw; now that’s the kind of consistency and skill you cannot teach.

Hunting in perfect tandem with Younis (the pair came to be known as ‘The Two Ws’, but not before Akram was crowned the ‘Sultan of Swing’), Pakistan’s bowling unit was widely seen as the most potent in world cricket. He was largely responsible for Pakistan’s fairytale World Cup win in 1992, and also the best bowler for the country in the three editions that followed.

Akram the batsman was quirky at best, and yet effective at crucial junctures. His most memorable batting performances included a match saving-cum-winning knock of 45 at Lords, which took Pakistan from 95/8 to victory, chasing England’s 138. And then there was the ‘no-one-saw-that-coming’ 257 against Zimbabwe in ’96. That innings, along with the couple of hundreds he notched up in pressure-cooker situations while touring Australia the previous year, underlined Akram’s all-rounder capabilities.

Glory is often shadowed by pain and threatened by disgrace. Akram’s high-flying career was by no means a perfect one. He was often laid-off with injuries all over the place – groin, intercostal muscle, shoulder and pelvis. Add to that appendicitis, hernias and diabetes that subsequently led to loss in eyesight, and you have cricket’s version of Wile E. Coyote. Painkillers fuelled his terrific 11-wicket haul against Australia at Melbourne in 1989, which was after the first of his two groin surgeries. The second surgery resulted in a muscle-tear in the pelvis, which left his left leg only half as strong as his right. He is said to have experienced severe to moderate shoulder pain every time he bowled in the last eight years of his career. Diabetes hit him at age 30, which came as a shock because no one in his family had a record of the disease.

To cap it all off, allegations of match-fixing hit like a freak-wave at the turn of the millennium. Mere whispers about having perpetrated cricket’s cardinal sin usually finish careers, and Akram’s accuser was the highest judicial authority in his homeland. To this day, many believe he got off the hook because he had friends in high places, but the fact remains that those allegations were never proved. Nevertheless, Akram was thought to be finished once the report made headlines.

Over the next five days in a Test match at Antigua, he snared 11 West Indian wickets. It seemed the never-say-die spirit he possessed would allow neither contentions nor his own battered mortal form to make the call on his adieu from international cricket. Akram was a cricketer who had lasted 19 years on his own terms – an incredible time span for a fast bowler.

Today, he remains one of the most visible faces of Pakistan cricket. The wizard has left behind his book of spells, but he continues to teach and inspire. The eternal warrior that he is, Akram doesn’t believe basking in glory is the way to go about life. He has revolutionized the very idea of fast-bowling to become more than a weapon of intimidation, and yet everyday he gets up in the morning, he steps out to continue his endeavour for the betterment of the craft. The numerous training camps he holds all over the globe, and also the coaching assignments of varying degrees, are testimony to his passion and near-inexhaustible reserves of energy.

His legacy grows on, and one wonders if it’s because Akram has always played like there was no tomorrow. Genius has no illusions of grandeur; it is an extraordinary resilience to vulnerability that sets apart the best of cricketers.