Wasim Akram Retires

[MrsTarrant]

Wasim Akram announces international retirement
Wisden CricInfo staff - 18 May 2003

Wasim Akram has announced that he is retiring from international cricket with immediate effect.

Wasim said that it was time to look to life after cricket. "My future is somewhere else after September," he told Sky Sports's Charles Colville. "Maybe I will be working in television or coaching. There are no regrets. There have been ups and downs but I would not have changed it for anything else."

Wasim had suggested that he was ready to quit several times in recent months, but the bitter disappointment of the World Cup proved to be a tournament too far. He was subsequently dropped for April's Sharjah Cup and was also omitted from the Pakistan squad for the current Bank Alfalah Cup triangular series. At 36, and with Pakistan publicly looking to build for the future, it was unlikely whether Wasim would have been able to force his way back into the side anyway.

[HAL]

Yeah. . . . . He played 104 Tests and scored 3 centuries, the highest being 257 n.o. He took 414 wickets @ 22.64

He also played 356 ODIs for 502 wickets @ 23.52

He has two hat tricks in each form of the great game.

[Donny]

Hey that's excellent, HAL. You're learning, m8.

Profile:
The all-time great


Yet another in the long line of Pakistan's precocious cricketers, Wasim Akram was being compared to legendary Australian left-handed quickie, Allan Davidson, even before he had played his first Test. By the time he played his 100th Test, he had established himself not only as the greatest southpaw ever, but also as one of all-time greats of the game.

Brought out of the wilderness by that astute spotter of new talent, Javed Miandad, he took to the big league as easily as a fish to water. In only his second Test against New Zealand at Dunedin, the prodigy had a haul of 10 wickets, becoming the youngest bowler to achieve the signal honour.

He was lightning fast then, revelling in his youth and was also quick to learn all the tricks of the trade from his mentor, Imran Khan, who was generous in imparting his knowledge to the young protege. Under the master's benign gaze, he quickly fashioned his lethal swinging yorker, deceptive variation of pace, the one moving sharply into the right-handed batsman as well as his natural away-swinger slanting across the right-hander, and employed this formidable array to telling effect. He was soon being singled out as being among the all-time greats of bowling.

After 15 years of intense international cricket, both for his country and in county cricket in England, his pace may have slowed down a fraction but his penetration and ability to beat the bat almost at will remains unrivalled. And he has a glorious record to show for his efforts. Wasim Akram is the only bowler to have captured more than 400 wickets both in Test and one-day cricket. The only one to have passed 400 in the limited-overs cricket, he also has a brace of hat-tricks in both forms of the game.

As captain, his greatest disappointment was in not being able to emulate the feat of Imran Khan and winning the 1999 World Cup, bowing out to Australia in the final: a case of so near, yet so far. Yet another major reverse also fell in late 1999, when with him leading the side Down Under, Pakistan was blanked out by the Aussies in the short rubber.

To this greatest of left-handed bowlers the game has known, another letdown must be his inability to establish himself as a genuine all-rounder in the class of Imran. Despite flashes of brilliance, as in the '92 World Cup and in the Sheikhupura Test against Zimbabwe, when he made 257, he has not fulfilled his tremendous potential - and cricket is the loser for it.

The match-fixing scandal that has haunted him for nearly half a decade is also a blot on an otherwise brilliant career.

Despite these, Akram holds his own in the pantheon of all-time greats by the sheer dint of his performances, his unmatched versatility and guile. - Agha Akbar

[gobbles21]

Ecxellent HAL, that is the greatest post you have ever done!

Congratulations Wasim on a great career and good luck for the future.

[HAL]

Thank you, thank you very much. I would like to thank everyone who helped. . .

[Donny]

Former captains praise Wasim
Wisden CricInfo staff - 19 May 2003

Wasim Akram was showered with praise by former colleagues following his decision to end his 19-year international career, but Pakistan's selectors also came in for criticism over their handling of him.

Former captain Imran Khan, who mentored Wasim as an 18-year-old, hailed him as one of last century's greatest fast bowlers. "I reckon Wasim and West Indian Michael Holding are two of the best and most natural fast bowlers of the century," Khan told AFP.

Taking Wasim under his wing in 1984, Imran nurtured him until he became one of international cricket's most productive fast bowlers. "Grooming Wasim was the easiest thing because he was naturally gifted. All I ingrained in him was the ability to take wickets," said Imran, adding that the retirement decision was "the right thing."

But Imran accused the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) of ending Wasim's career in an undignified manner. "I do think the PCB should not have dumped him in such an unceremonious manner."

Another former captain, Zaheer Abbas, described Wasim as the "pride of Pakistani cricket." He continued: "Losing a player like Wasim is the most depressing thing. It will be hard to replace him."

But Amir Sohail, Pakistan's chief selector, denied Wasim's decision was prompted by his expulsion. "We did not close the doors on any senior player. Wasim could have staged a comeback," he said. "Wasim was a great servant of Pakistani cricket and I pay him the richest of tributes."

[Donny]

The granddaddy of reverse swing
Gideon Haigh - 19 May 2003

Wasim Akram plays cricket like there's no tomorrow. And at times it must feel like there won't be. He has already retired from cricket once, been hectored to do so on several other occasions, and suffered the sack as captain and cricketer perhaps as often as any player in history. He has been accused of cricket's most heinous crime and escaped the supreme sanction only because of his accuser's equivocations.

Then there are the injuries and infirmities. Shane Warne has likened his life to a soap opera; Akram's is more like a medical drama. At one time or other, every pivotal point in Akram's body has buckled: groin, intercostal muscle, shoulder, pelvic bones. Then there have been the hernias, appendicitis, and diabetes leading to deteriorating eyesight. The money in Akram's family came from a business in spare parts; over the years he could have done with a few himself.

Few careers have been clouded by so many intimations of mortality. But few will have such ongoing impact on the techniques of the game: Akram has been the most accomplished practitioner of a skill that is probably older than imagined but has been formally acknowledged for little more than a decade. The development of reverse swing, as much as the renascence in wrist spin, was the headline trend of the 1990s.

Most cricket fans now have the gist of reverse swing, if not a grasp of its arcane physics: how ballast and wear on one side of a cricket ball achieve, in reverse, effects like those of protection and polishing. But they underestimate its subversiveness. Like the googly, BJT Bosanquet's jeu d'esprit a hundred years ago, reverse swing was an act of counter-intuition, requiring dry, not overcast, conditions; extreme pace, not "time for the ball to swing"; and the ball's deterioration rather than its preservation.

It has permanently altered the Test match ecosystem, emancipating the fast bowler with the old ball in the overs of an innings previously the preserve of slow and medium-pace bowlers and encouraging speed at a fuller length than was popular in the nasty, brutish and short 1980s. Particularly altered has been the predator-prey relationship between pace bowling and tail-end batting. It seemed 20 years ago that, with the opportunities afforded by professionalism to rehearse secondary skills and the enhancement in protective gear including the helmet, tail-end batting would probably improve in the long term; certainly the real duffer became a comparative rarity. Helmets, however, afforded no protection from late-swinging deliveries speared at the crease line: an art with which Akram is synonymous.

Cricket writer Scyld Berry's theory is that reverse swing, by shortening the average duration of tail-end innings, has been decisive in reducing the proportion of Test matches drawn since 1990. The view is persuasive, though hard to test. What can be demonstrated is Akram's departure from earlier conventions of pace bowling. A greater share of his wickets – 53 per cent – have been bowled or lbw than any fast bowler of the last 30 years, save his great rival Waqar Younis (57 per cent). For the purposes of comparison, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh obtained only a third of their wickets without the aid of a fieldsman or keeper, while the figures of Dennis Lillee (33 per cent), Richard Hadlee (40 per cent) and Malcolm Marshall (40 per cent) imply the different devices of an earlier generation. That 29 per cent of Akram's wickets have been secured lbw is freakish, considering the onus on a left-arm bowler seeking an umpire's indulgence from over the wicket.

Akram did not design his action with reverse swing in mind but it proved close to ideal, with the fast arm and firm wrist imparting the necessary pace and the 17-pace approach allowing him to sustain the effort involved in maintaining a consistently full length. No left-arm pace bowler since Garfield Sobers has varied his angles as resourcefully, and not even Sobers was as skilful from round the wicket.

The technique itself is actually one of cricket's great wonders, defying all the usual injunctions of coaches to perfect a balanced run of gathering speed and a smooth action of seamless grace. After a breakneck sprint, he barrels through the crease, front foot pointing down the pitch, back foot toward the sightscreen, arm a blur. That he has been able to repeat this almost 40,000 times in international cricket beggars belief. Add to this the burden that Akram has borne as a batsman – he has almost 3,000 Test runs to go with his 414 Test wickets – and one is compelled to consider another aspect of Akram's historical significance: his sheer durability.

The brunt of Akram's cricket has been borne by his groin and shoulder. His groin was first operated on in 1988 and again two years later. The latter operation was complicated when an adductor muscle separated from his pelvis, leaving his left leg only half as strong as his right: it was restored only by intensive physiotherapy. He first experienced shoulder pain seven years ago, while representing Lancashire, and delayed surgery, only to break down when he tried to bowl a bouncer during the Singer Cup Final in Sharjah in April 1997: there were further operations, a six-month lay-off and a regime of painkillers.

I could go on but it all grows a bit gruesome. We might think instead of Akram as embodying the impact of medical science on cricket, both in terms of prolonging careers and facilitating modern schedules. Once upon a time a single serious injury spelt more or less the end of a career. Players who recovered were hailed almost as miracles: think of Denis Compton's knee, Richie Benaud's shoulder and Dennis Lillee's back. Surgery today, by contrast, is almost as routine as the drinks break. There is far more discussion – some profound, some silly – about cricket being a game of "mental strength" (something Akram also has covered, having been married for nine years to a qualified psychotherapist).

Akram's ultimate place in his country's cricket history is hard to guess. His star has waxed and waned. He was one of 10 Pakistan captains in a bizarre period between March 1992 and August 1995, out of which also arose the allegations that resulted in his being fined on the suspicion of involvement in match-fixing after the Qayyum Report. Political contacts have kept Akram going as surely as surgeons.

Watching Akram last June, blasting out Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting with the first three deliveries of a one-day match in Melbourne, then looting an unbeaten 49 from 32 balls in the Gabba game, it was hard to escape the sad sensation that we in Australia might be seeing him for the last time. Then again, we've had that feeling before.

[Donny]

Akram lined up for final international hurrah
Wisden Cricinfo staff - June 2, 2003

The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) is planning to include Wasim Akram in their one-day side to face South Africa later this year as a formal farewell to his remarkable international career – despite Wasim announcing his retirement last month.

"He [Wasim] had given nothing to us [the PCB] in writing and we want to give him grand send-off from international cricket," explained Lt Gen Tauqir Zia, chairman of the PCB. Zia said the plan is for Wasim to be included in either the match at Lahore or Karachi: "It would be great to bid him farewell in front of his home crowd,"

And Zia added that they wanted to utilise Wasim's experience. "We want him to train Pakistani youngsters," he told reporters. "It would not be in our interest that he coach and train in England."

[JLC]

This must be Wasims 5th or 6th retirement. Wasim will be back once the police are off his trail....lol

jlc

[HAL]

What about it?

[Donny]

Ill health forces Wasim Akram to break Hampshire contract
Wisden CricInfo Staff - July 15, 2003

Pakistani legend Wasim Akram has been forced to quit his Hampshire contract for health reasons.

Wasim, who was on a one-year contract, made his decision today according to sources close to the left-arm fast-medium bowler.

Wasim is a diabetic and has been unwell over the past few months and has missed three of Hampshire's eight championship games. His departure is with immediate effect and Hampshire have started looking for a replacement.

Wasim is understood to have made the decision on advice from his doctors and has expressed his thanks to the club and his team-mates. He said he had enjoyed his brief stay with the club and wished it every success in its future.

When contacted, the Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Lt Gen Tauqir Zia said he wished Wasim a speedy recovery to full health.

His absence will be a disappointment to Hampshire as he had been working well with the side's younger players.

In his first-class career Wasim has taken 1042 wickets at 21.64. He has 414 Test wickets at 23.62 and 502 wickets at 23.52 and an economy rate of 3.89.

In five county championship games for Hampshire this year he headed the bowling averages with 20 wickets at 25.15.

[Donny]

Wasim not keen on international comeback
Wisden CricInfo staff - July 23, 2003

Wasim Akram has admitted he is unlikely to come out of retirement, not even to play in a farewell appearance against South Africa in October.

Wasim, who was one of eight players dropped after a disappointing World Cup campaign, had been offered the chance to play one last ODI in front of his home crowds, either in Karachi or Lahore. But, after his stint at Hampshire was cut short by illness (he is a diabetic), Wasim may now hang up his boots for good.

"I am grateful to the Pakistan board that they have offered me this final chance to play for Pakistan and in front of my home crowd," said Wasim. "But I think once you have retired it is over. So far I have not given [the PCB] any reply. But I am not really keen on playing any international match again. Doctors have advised me [to] rest for the time being."

In the meantime, Wasim has been summoned to appear before a Lahore court in September, to face charges of breaking Islamic law by appearing in an Indian liquor advertisement. A petition was filed by a Pakistani citizen, Mohammad Fayez, who demands a public apology from Wasim and damages of 25,000 rupees, roughly US$400.

Wasim, unsurprisingly, denies all the charges. "The news that a petition is filed against me in a Pakistan court surprised me," he said, "because I never featured in a liquor advertisement and can never imagine to break religious laws. I think it's a publicity stunt which is very common in Pakistan and I am used to it." Fayez's lawyer, Ansar Mahmood Bajwa, insisted it was a matter of principle.

[zoia]

even though he wasnt a aussie, he was still a good cricket player and will be missed