Haseeb Hameed will make his Test debut for England on Wednesday morning in Rajkot, six hours drive from where his father was raised and where the family – minus Haseeb, who stayed with the England squad to prepare for the Test – attended his brother’s wedding last weekend.
“I guess a lot of things are meant to be,” said Hameed on the eve of the Test. “The fact it [his debut] is against India in the home state of my parents, the way it has fallen into place, is amazing. I was asked if I wanted to go [to the wedding] but my family said it was better to stay with the team. They are from a small village near Bharuch, but my dad’s village is called Umraj.”
Hameed will be the fifth youngest cricketer to play a Test for England. When given his cap on the morning of the match he will be 19 years and 298 days old but he looks much younger.
Hameed is wafer thin, with fingers like Twiglets. No doubt he goes to the gym like all the others but there is no discernible sign. The immediate reaction as he sits contemplating his first Test is to feel concern someone who looks so young is going to be pitched against the battle-hardened cricketers of the No1 team in the world in their own backyard.
But then Hameed speaks and those anxieties recede. There is a remarkable calmness as he shares his thoughts, speaking with a soft Mancunian accent. “One of the qualities that has been instilled into me is not to get too high or too low. Cricket is a very up and down game so it’s important to stay level-headed and take things in the short term, day by day, ball by ball, as it comes”.
He does not seem worried at all. He thought he might relax with a game of table-tennis, which one can surmise was probably not the form of relaxation chosen by fellow teenage England debutants, Brian Close and Denis Compton, on the eve of their first Tests in 1949 and 1937 respectively.
Already Hameed suggests he has a mature perspective on his rapid rise to England’s ranks. “It’s a great experience and at the end of the tour I will be a better player, regardless of how the tour goes. It’s a great chance to be part of an exciting England side. The key for me is not to dwell on it too much.”
He is no stranger to India. “I have been a couple times on my own training a bit in Mumbai. There has been some coaching with Vidya Paradkar helping me get used to conditions. It’s always been a special place to come and hopefully it will be this time.”
He is happy to acknowledge Virat Kohli is one of his cricketing heroes. “That’s another thing that excites me about this series. There are guys on both sides I can watch and learn from. And I have to do my job as well. It would be amazing to speak to a guy like Virat.”
On the television screens here there have been constant replays of the Ahmedabad and Kolkata Tests of 2012 (India won in Ahmedabad but lost in Kolkata) and Hameed recalls watching them first time around. “I remember bits, how Cooky played and KP. I remember England were underdogs and they pulled off a remarkable victory. We can take confidence from that this time. We are underdogs here; coming to India is the biggest challenge in cricket.”
But despite being such a slender youth and being catapulted into the role of partnering England’s most prolific opening batsman with barely any meaningful preparation in the middle over the last month, Hameed manages to give the impression he is not so overawed by the challenge as one may expect.
