Cricket: The fastest ball at Dhaka Stadium
The speedster, the fast bowler, occupies a special place in a cricket team. He is an object of fascination, Zeus with the thunderbolts. In his hand the red leather orb - yet untouched, yet un-bowled - lurks, with the potential to annihilate and lay waste the pretensions of batting maestros, and capable of instilling such blind terror that the battle is half won before it's even been joined. It's only when the opening salvo fails to rip apart the defences of the opposing side that that the contest settles into into its battle of attrition and guerrilla warfare, with its caves and long marches across the yunan. But first comes the cavalry charge across the open plains, and the corresponding lush warmth generated among the spectators by its open surrender to the atavistic, primitive core which is at the heart of all sports where speed is king, and which in cricket resides in the team's speed merchants. The gods first have to be appeased. Maybe Michael Madhusudhan had seen a fast bowler before he started on his Meghnad Badh Kabya: Out came the Raksasas king astride his Puspaka. Its wheels screamed loudly, spitting sparks. The team of horses neighed with spirit. … The Puspaka sped along, grinding , growling. Its wheels, like discs of fire, rained sparks everywhere… Speed kept coming up as I steadily plowed my way through autobiographies and personal accounts by cricketing greats of the recent past: Lloyd, Gower, Boycott, Atherton, Gavaskar, Gatting, Imran, to take just a few. These books are cricket writing's basic bread and butter, not Test tour literature or recondite history, but life-in-the-trenches stuff. The 1960s and '70s yarns are better, when the games were, unlike globalization's dulling effects, sharply edged by issues of race and nation. In 1967 Tony Grieg, England's captain, made the West Indian team furious by saying that he intended to make them "grovel." Clive Lloyd in his Living For Cricket wrote that "Whether Greig realized it or not, the word 'grovel' is one guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of any black man. It conjures up hated images of hundreds of years of slavery and servility, and its use was compounded, in this case, by the fact that Greig was a white South African…We resolved to show him that the days of groveling were over…Every time Greig came to the wicket…our fast bowler seemed to gain an extra few miles an hour from somewhere. I will never forget (Andy) Roberts charging in to the tall England skipper in the first Test at Trent Bridge and sending the off-stump reeling several yards before he had a chance to put his bat down. It was one of the fastest deliveries I have ever seen…" Speed! In the service of the disenfranchised, the newly freed and de-colonized! All the above writers, no matter whether bowler or batsman, sooner or later, veer around, mesmerized, to the topic of fast bowling. Who was the fastest he ever faced. What was the fastest ball, or spell, he ever saw. Or bowled. Speed is the ultimate groove. And aside from the Australian duo of Lillee and 'Thommo', it's the West Indies who were the dream machine, the team that, as one writer put it, "for two decades roamed the world with an invincible swagger." Its fast men started with Hall and Griffith, who handed the baton, or in this case, the ball over to Marshall, Roberts, Holding, Croft, Holder, Daniels, Garner… the list is long, very long. In his Sunny Days, Gavaskar talks about Sabina Park in 1976: "The new ball which Lloyd took the next day was just the missile Holding needed for his lethal deliveries…The first ball to Vishwanath must have been the most frightening delivery he has ever faced. It almost took his head with it. A similar delivery after some time crushed Vishwanath's finger, as he defended his face, and Julien again took an easy catch." Holding also bowled what is acknowledged as the best over, to Geoff Boycott, where each successive delivery was faster than the previous one, with Boycott desperately hopping around to get out of the way, until as the crowd's roar reaching a crescendo, the final ball sent the timber cartwheeling! Imran Khan, in his All Round View, also wrote of Holding, at a World Series Cup match in Sydney, "(running) in from one end and Roberts from the other, and it was the only time I ever saw batsmen trying to get away from the strike at one end so they could face Roberts, who was also in his prime. Holding was bowling like the wind: when I went in to bat, the wicket-keeper, Deryck Murray, was standing so far back that I couldn't see how the ball could possibly reach him. Whenever I see Desmond Haynes, I remind him of that spell. He remembers it well: he was fielding at short leg, and he had to shout to Murray to make himself heard, because the keeper was so far away." And so on, and on…I can't quote from all the books, but the above should give anybody the idea what can go on in the cricket field when a genuine tearaway is running in, all cylinders firing! So, who, or what, was the fastest you ever saw in Dhaka stadium? Dunno 'bout you, guv, but for me the answer's easy. In January 1986, when Bangladesh and international cricket were getting to know each other, the Pakistani cricket writer Omar Kureishi arranged for a team led by Imran Khan to tour Bangladesh. The Omar Kureishi XI was practically the Pakistan test side then, with players such as Rameez Raja, Salim Malik, Abdul Qadir, Wasim Akram, and an aging but still dangerous Sarfraz Nawaz, the father of reverse swing. Seated on the upstairs gallery I could see them on the other side of the dividing rope, lolling on their chairs whenever they wer batting, a little bored, a little too glamorous for the likes of Dhaka stadium, with its peeling paint and country ways. Imran looked in great shape - as Sunil Gavaskar wrotr, he had "one of the most magnificent bodies one can hope to see." Stories still abound about how Dhaka women went nuts for him. Though Imran had been off cricket for two years, from 1982 to 1984, due to an injury, he had recovered to sign up to play for New South Wales in Australia. Slugging it out with the Aussies had toned him up, but when he bowled in Dhaka, it was only fast medium. We couldn't figure it out. In the match I saw at Dhaka, at one stage when our tail-enders were at the crease, Imran was bowling to Rafiqul Alam, who had just come in. Rafiq was the Bangladeshi pace bowler who was the second man to Badsha's new-ball attack. Imran ran in and bowled a half-volley, to which Rafiq went forward on the front foot and with perfect timing and power, uncorked a blistering straight drive to the boundary. Dhaka stadium erupted into a din that lasted a full two or three minutes. Imran, who hadn't even completed his follow-through, whirled his head sideways in mid-stride to look with utter astonishment at the ball streaking past him. A straight drive! Something which every genuine fast bowler tends to take very personally! Was it our imagination or did Imran walk back to a longer run-up for the next delivery, and the wicketkeeper move back? Abdul Qadir standing at second slip, we later heard, rubbed his palms together and called out to Rafiq, "Abay, beta, abhi aarai," (rough translation: Oh boy, something wicked is coming this way!). Imran charged in this time and unleashed a bouncer that screamed in straight at Rafiq's head. He barely managed to duck and get his head out of the way, with the keeper collecting the ball at shoulder height. It was the quickest ball I had ever seen bowled in Dhaka Stadium, and the crowd at first was silent, then went 'Oooooohh!' It was then that we realized, not having seen genuine pace at the international level for a very long time, the Indy 500 speed Imran clocked at when he bowled flat out, that all this time he had really been bowling at half-strength, conserving his energies for the coming tour of Sri Lanka. Having made his point, Imran took his foot off the pedal and resumed bowling again at half-pace. But that bouncer has stayed with me all these years. Roger Binny bowled here fresh from his triumphs and he didn't come close to that delivery. I didn't even see the ball leave Imran's hand, I picked it up only after it hit the pitch and took off, and the next time I saw it was fractionally later - just before it disappeared into the wicketkeeper's gloves. In-between, I had seen nothing at all…
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