Shoaib Akhtar strikes the IPL (14 May 2008)

Whatever your sport, this is an exciting old article salvaged from a defunct website, which really lets you feel what it was like to be this person. Published with permission.

Four wickets for 11 runs on debut and the balance of power changes.

For all of those folks who bowl slow and will never know, genuine fast bowling, the real thing, is right up there with the most wonderful sensations you can ever experience in a human lifetime. You can’t purchase a ticket for it, no amount of expensive equipment will buy you speed, you are either born with the sheer elemental stump-shattering rush in your bones or you aren’t and Shoaib Akhtar has it shining out of his ears in big screen video with amplifiers stuck on eleven.

The strike bowling role in cricket is the most colourful, exciting and adrenaline-floodingly lethal job in the game. Imagine being a cavalier on a thoroughbred charger slanting into a line of slow, foot-slogging Roundheads. You’re either going to smash them apart and rout them on your own or perhaps they’ll survive and absorb the attack but, hey, they’re sure as hell going to remember the day they met you.

The sensation of bowling incredibly fast is worthy of description. Have you ever had one of those flying dreams, where you’re mostly asleep but have the feeling your feet are hovering above the ground, floating, and you don’t want to grab the bedclothes to hold yourself down because the sensation of weightlessness might stop? Well, a genuine fast bowler running into the wicket feels like that through the approach.

Running on clouds, on-song, bouncing in, tunnel-vision, focused and flying toward the frightened quarry. Feel the rush felt by the swiftest things alive and share the thought that all really quick bowlers have as they charge, that the power lays coiled in their hand to knock over any batsman in the world in one part of a single second… if only they can produce that one magic delivery.

Fast bowlers have an air of arrogance about them, probably from knowing how many bats and stumps they have broken through the course of their career. They’re predatory, counting their victims as a fighter pilot would paint kills on the side of his plane. A true quick will firmly believe and openly say that spinners shouldn’t even be bowling.

If a fast bowler is ‘on-song’ they can be as absolutely unplayable as Curtly Ambrose was on his best tour of Australia, as Wasim and Waqar were in the year they exported reverse-swing to England, as a Thompson onslaught at Perth or the hellish legend of Larwood in ’33. However, if a quick bowler loses the rhythm of their action, their control of line and length or ‘gets the yips’ (an inexplicable loss of direction, leading to panic), they can be dreadful or sometimes painfully embarrassing. The odd thing is, their captain can never be completely sure which of these alternate personas is going to pitch up.

Losing the groove or misplacing some pace can happen to anyone but the real quick also suffers the crippling sense of self-doubt that comes from their inner fear that they won’t be able to do it any more; they won’t be able to hunt.

Most fast bowlers find they cannot continue in first class cricket beyond the age of twenty eight. The loss of speed and accuracy isn’t just down to age. The wear and tear on the body, the wrenching of intercostal muscles, tearing of the medial collateral ligament in the knee, trapping of nerves between vertebrae and occasional finger damage from the ball hit back eventually takes it toll. Refusing to accept it, thinking ‘Surely I’ve got one more season in me?’, is the usual pattern that heralds the end. The bowler remembers in their body fibres how it feels to bowl in an onslaught under summer skies, at their peak moment, and will be convinced that if nothing has changed in their mind, the body can be over-ruled. It usually can’t. Last hurrahs can be embarrassing.

When Spring cracks on your final season it brings with it reality as you realise you’ve somehow lost ten miles an hour over the winter break. Just as the old lion inevitably relinquishes its territory to the younger replacement, you can’t fight nature; but you can adapt. The old fast bowler bluffs it for a while, doesn’t mention that niggle, reminding people how fast they were. They might say they are making up the difference in runs scored now that they’ve improved their batting, but the choice is clear: They must change their bowling style, becoming slower but clever and more accurate, to deceive the batsman more, (ideally to ‘think people out’ instead of blasting them out), they must work on moving the ball sideways more (as no bowler can get away with bowling slower and not moving the ball), they can become a medium pacer (boring), a spinner (oh, the shame) or they can simply take the hint, protect their reputation forever as a genuine fast bowler and walk away maintaining their average, never to play again.

Shoaib Akhtar of Pakistan is twenty-eight years old.

The young fast-bowler’s run up is occasionally epic and in Shoaib’s case it is still twenty-three paces. The fast bowler expends more energy and steams away more sweat than any other type of player in cricket. In a fifty over match, with eight overs bowled by the fast bowler plus fielding, the average weight loss each game is around 2.5 lbs. The more usual ‘stock bowlers’ conserve their energies and cannot be compared to this burn rate.

To focus shock, the fastest bowlers of all may be used by captains in short bursts as ‘strike bowlers’. They will be asked to launch between two and four overs as fast as they possibly can. With licence to bowl at extreme pace, without worrying about how many runs they concede, their captain is hoping to take breakthrough wickets at any price. Cheap wickets in this way could win a match, but no wickets from the ploy, bearing in mind that any deflection of the bowler’s energy can easily run a ball to the boundary, can give the opposition a flying start and winning confidence. No wickets for a strike bowler equals failure.

In a Test match, the strike bowler completes their short spell and then has to be carried by the rest of the attack for long periods of play. When this doesn’t happen, when the fastest bowler has been asked to bowl ten overs or more in a session (a mistake the captain makes with Lasith Malinga of Sri Lanka), they seldom take wickets. Shoaib Akhtar is the perfect weapon for IPL cricket because, being limited to just four overs and being carried by the rest of the attack for just sixteen, with the opposition’s batsmen scoring fast anyway, this is the perfect strike bowler’s slot.

One advantage of fast bowling is that if you bowl a loose ball, making an error in line and length, you may often get away with the mistake without being punished because the batsman’s thinking and reacting time is brief, perhaps a third of a second from hitting the ground to passing the bat so it can often shoot past him before he’s put his feet into the correct position to strike it. Spin bowlers never get away with a full toss, but fast bowlers can.

Shoaib is very wayward, but can follow up a blotchy wide with a spectacular wicket-taking delivery, as he did with the perfect away swinger that he produced to take the wicket of Virender Sehwag in the bowler’s debut IPL performance.

Last night, Shoaib Akhtar effectively won the match on his own in just three overs. Delhi, chasing a pathetic target of 133 and expected by the crowd to win, crashed to 110 all out. Why? That’s because Akhtar blew away the top four batsmen, all masters of their art (Sehwag, Gambhir, de Villiers and Tiwary), and very good players of pace too, exposing batsmen who had thus far been protected and leaving the favourites Delhi without the resources to overcome the rest of Kolkata’s bowling. Three overs, four wickets for eleven runs, a city’s walls go down and this is the IPL so almost a billion people worldwide were watching the show.

Akhtar will not be this effective every time, which is the quintessential gamble of strike bowling. When he’s on-song though, when the juices are flowing, he’s potentially the most eye-catching player, the greatest potential match winner in the whole extravaganza of the Indian Premier League. If he breaks down or if the partisan Indian franchises choose to exclude Pakistani players, that torch will surely pass to the yorker king, Lasith Malinga, then to who knows?

Akhtar’s quite a different animal to the likes of Shaun Tait or Brett Lee and, in the slower lane, the methodical Glenn McGrath. He doesn’t calculate like them. Akhtar doesn’t bowl robotically, with accurate placement and economy, knowing the percentage chances of taking wickets with certain deliveries to certain batsmen. Line, length and patience? Sod that! He’s driven by the predator’s hunger and thrill seeker’s love of pushing the speedometer further than anyone around him without worrying about the tyres.

He knows he’s the fastest thing on the pitch, in the tournament, in the world, a feral cat in the valley of flightless birds. He’d take on his own team too if he could. Firebrands like this bowl as if it’s their last day alive, a flaming, screeching nose dive into the heartland of the opposition. Sometimes he’ll crash pointlessly in an open field as he did in England, but sometimes (as yesterday) he’ll inflict so much damage that the other side loses its ability to fight in a matter of minutes. Now, that’s worth watching.

Well done Shoaib Akhtar. Whatever you do now, you’ve woken the slumbering IPL with a clash of proper 99 mph fast bowling. When you’re gone, we won’t remember the days you failed because you’ll always be the real thing, for which the game itself is grateful. When trophy matches drift into professionalism and the teams treat it all as another routine day at the office, when tournaments become mid-range hype and advertising, we’ll remember you, Shoaib, as something else. They are ballads. You are Rock & Roll.