Wasim Akram Quotes

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Wasim starts this one wide. Very wide. But from the moment he puts it out there, it starts to move in. It’s the most typical Wasim Akram ball. The ball doesn’t just swing, it manages its own destiny in a madcapped energetic way. It’s an orb of light more than a ball. Fluttering. Dancing. Lewis gets on the front foot and pushes towards it, but the ball zips past him quicker than he can see. It takes a bit of inside edge for dramatic effect and zaps into the stumps. This is reverse swing.

Wasim Akram and Waqar could win a World Cup on their own. When Wasim bowled, the ball had a mind of its own. It could be placed on the same spot, repeatedly on a good day, but it also leapt up, cut left, cut right, swung in, swung out. It was as if it was being operated by a remote control. His run-up was reportedly 17 paces, but it felt like six super quick steps and a left arm that was invisible to the eye. He was the combination of every single tape ball bowler in Pakistan’s street cricket history. When Wasim bowled, it felt like anything could happen.

Yet cricket was never the problem. In some ways, challenging as it often was, it was the simplest part of my life. Bowling to Viv Richards, Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara or batting against Shane Warne, Malcolm Marshall or Muttiah Muralitharan was child’s play compared to handling the expectations of my nation, the turmoil of my team and the machinations of my administration.

CONVENTIONAL SWING (BALL SWINGS IN THE DIRECTION THE SEAM IS POINTING) ‘The key to swinging the ball is to keep a light grip and secondly the flick of the wrist with the fingers going down the ball … not across it. This is the major point. The bowler has to keep the energy behind the ball by flicking their fingers to six o’clock on the dial, rather than to five o’clock or seven o’clock. ‘The grip is also important. The fingers can be together or apart, but I preferred them to be together. Others like the great Ray Lindwall, Australia’s fast bowler of years gone by, would have his fingers placed on both sides of the seam. It’s a personal preference only. ‘I always loved the saying: “If he misses, I will hit his stumps.” It is simple but it is accurate, and 52 per cent of my dismissals in Test and one-day cricket were bowled or LBW.’ THE YORKER: WASIM AKRAM

In fact, I think our late-1980s Lancashire team would have been unbelievable at T20 – Neil Fairbrother, Mike Watkinson, Phillip DeFreitas, Wasim Akram, we’d have had one hell of a side.

Bowling has the problem of wildly differing methods so that placing Wasim Akram against Bishan Bedi is rather like hanging a Rembrandt next to a Picasso and trying to produce a valid comparison.