At the World Twenty20 in India last April, a strange thing kept happening. Every time Pakistan started a new innings in the field, a slender young man with a dubious goatee would take the new ball. He would approach light-footed to the crease and expel its lacquered shine in a whip of arms. It would flicker down the wicket, most often into the keeper’s gloves, a flash of white so fierce that from the stands, you were sure it left a brief boomerang after-image on the retina.
In a tournament where Hulk-rage batsmen pounded along at eight, 10, 12 runs an over, Mohammad Amir rendered them mute, immobile, human-sized columns of confusion. He could slim bloated opening stands with this one neat trick. Curving the ball at serious pace, sometimes away from a groping bat, other times inward to pad or stumps. Finding that length, just short enough for movement to be most effective, full enough to have batsmen coming forward.
Later in an innings, the spell would break. Not one for the pragmatic defence of cross-seamers, wide yorkers, slow bouncers, Amir would be slogged away like any other player for dimes and dozens, a fine crystal vase used for slurping cheap lager. But at each beginning, for an over or two, there was a moment when everyone forgot not to respect the craft. There was a moment when he was treated like a bowler.
He shouldn’t have been there. Not for any moral reasons, but because five years out of the game with suspension seemed like too much for a player to overcome. How could he hope to reach his previous standards? How could that fallow time not have dragged him back to the realm of the normal?
Except it isn’t really like that. Take Patrick Cummins, Australia’s theoretical speed sensation, who played his first Test in late 2011 and hasn’t been back since. His five years on the sidelines have been enforced by injury, but they haven’t stopped him being talked up as a potential matchwinner, a potential tourist to India in February, a potential Ashes player next year.
Of course there are differences between physical and ethical rehabilitation: injured players are far more able to be involved with cricket clubs, boards, and teams while suspended, and have a level of financial support. But at a basic level, bowlers spending long periods out of the game before the age of 25 is more rule than exception.
Amir is 24, and returned to Test cricket this year. Across his career he has played 22 Tests. By his 25th birthday, James Pattinson had played 13. Mitchell Starc had played 15, as had Josh Hazlewood. Mitchell Marsh had played 18. Then there’s Cummins. All of them have had the injury complications that young fast bowlers display: stress fractures, back problems, groin strains, the murmured catechism of late-night sports reports.
All of which means that a fast-bowling career starting in his teens could well have seen Amir spending substantial parts of the last five years sidelined with injury. Such injuries could have tested his patience with rehab and relapse. They could have left him physically hampered in ways he now isn’t, having avoided irreparable damage from over-bowling too young. It’s a stretch to say that a match-fixing suspension was a blessing in disguise, but there’s a genuine case to say that it may not end up doing much harm. Perhaps he is now better suited to play deep into his 30s with a more robust frame.
That frame will deliver the pink Test ball at the Gabba this week. Amir has been to Australia before: he shocked the MCG with his first five-wicket haul, comprising the names Ponting, Hussey, Clarke, North and Haddin. He was 17 years old at the time, whippet-thin, with a white headband, ghostface sunscreen, and an adolescent fringe flopped over one eye. These days the frame has filled out a little, the beard gives him the look of an IT professional living out a daydream, and he must be heartily sick of being whacked into the middle of redemption narratives everywhere he goes.
The comeback story is done: to domestic cricket, Pakistan selection, international cricket in New Zealand, Tests at Lord’s. All that is behind him, as we can only hope are the circumstances of his ban. Ahead of him is Australia, and conditions that Amir may be well placed to use.
We saw his danger in the tour game in Cairns: the Cricket Australia XI facing Amir under lights gave him three wickets for three runs before stumps. Anyone facing him in the last hour during Brisbane’s Test will likely wish they were somewhere else. The tour game also showed Pakistan’s traditional struggles on Australian pitches, but Australia too has frailties with the bat, and the CA XI side’s destruction tells of the strength of Pakistan’s bowling.
If the old heads Misbah-ul-Haq and Younis Khan, the obdurate Azhar Ali, the counterattacking Sarfraz Ahmed, can cobble together enough to bowl to, that attack can shine. This series in its entirety could be a battle of the quicks, and in a series made for bowlers rather than blasts over the sightscreen, Amir could yet put himself foremost among them. Contribute to a series win in Australia, and it might seem like five years in the wilderness hasn’t cost him much at all.
