Amir

This is basically a tweet that got long

Osman Samiuddin’s wonderful profile of Mohammad Amir is so well formed that I initially didn’t want to diminish it by saying anything at all beyond such trivialities as “read this” and “this is ace”. But given that, even having read it, I still don’t quite know how I feel about the man, I’m going to witter on for a bit anyway to see if it helps.

I’m definitely not a reliable witness when it comes to Amir. The “summer of Amir” coincided with the peak intensity of my time as a Pakistan fan, and probably as a cricket fan. He, and the Pakistan side, arrived in the UK to play Australia at about the same time that I got back from Faisalabad, where I had spent a month or so doing field research for my MSc thesis, and I watched the back to back series with the ferocious intensity that can only come when you are desperately procrastinating to escape from the six years worth of poorly formatted local government accounts you are supposed to be munging through for evidence of patronage. I had to finish this work before the deadline I had set myself of the first day of that fateful Lord’s test, which — due to my father overestimating interest in the game and thus overenthusiastically entering the ballot — remains to this day the only test match I was present for every day of. So Amir looms over Pakistani cricket as seen through my specific lens far larger than he does to a more objective observer.

Amir’s also very much my kind of sportsperson: brave and cerebral in equal measure, utterly fearless without being even slightly mindless, outwitting opponents rather than outplaying them, scheming always scheming even as they march stoically through hell. Juan Manuel Marquez, Thierry Dusautoir, about half the 2017 era Scotland side, Mohammad Amir.

So I definitely lost my head with Amir a bit, but the reason I thought he could be on track to become an all time great was not just because he seemed to be able to bowl unplayable inswinging yorkers at will, but because at the age of 17 he was outwitting the most thoughtful batsmen in the world. Some of his wickets came from jaffers, but to me his most impressive ones came from working over batsmen, outthinking and outfoxing them and then seeing them fall straight into the traps he had set. Here was a teenager who, in his first year in test cricket, had already shown himself to have a better cricketing brain than Ricky Ponting, and because he would surely only develop his cricketing acumen as he got older — and it already seemed to be growing with every game he played — I could only imagine him getting better and better.

Samiuddin’s piece touches on, but does not address head on, the main difference I see between pre- and post-ban Amir. I actually think Amir’s physical gifts are almost entirely undiminished. Strip away the romance and the confidence and the momentum and his best balls as a 17 year old weren’t really better or more frequent than his best balls now. But the difference is now the sophistication has gone entirely. It’s all incredibly direct, thoughtless. It’s not so much that it’s seedhi seedhi as the fact that it’s just a bit dumb, not so much straight as straightforward. He can still get you out with a good ball, but no one has ever been outwitted or worked over by post-ban Amir. And so now his good balls are the only ones you need to worry about.

How did, even allowing for the hyperbole of my fandom, the most intelligent teenage bowler I’ve ever seen become someone who bowls like someone who’s physically gifted but a bit thick? Samiuddin’s piece doesn’t explain but maybe gives clues.

Firstly it talks about how utterly obsessed Amir had been with cricket from the age of, assuming the memory of Afridi’s century is correct, 4. His entire life has been thinking about how to get batsmen out. And then after his ban, in loneliness and depression, it wasn’t just that he stopped playing cricket — he’d had long layoffs before and hadn’t even learned to play hardball cricket until he was 16 — but that for the first time in his life he’d stopped thinking about cricket. Samiuddin talks about how the game moved on while he stood still, but I think physically he could catch up, and did. But maybe mentally he couldn’t? Maybe he fell out of love with the game, and could no longer understand what he no longer loved? Maybe that’s hopelessly romantic but maybe, while the muscle memory of an action can survive layoff like the muscle memory for driving a car, the mental game does not come back in the same way? Maybe this too is romantic but I feel few people have understood the mind of a batsman as well as the 17 year old Amir did, and maybe that level of understanding can only come from a lifetime of study. Study which — once interrupted — cannot easily be resumed with the same level of insight, particularly by someone who now has an ambivalent relationship to the game.

He also paints a portrait of someone who defers readily to authority figures, and is particularly keen to do so when he feels threatened. Whatever was happening off the field in 2010, Amir definitely looked like he was in charge when he was bowling. He might not have set his own fields (although it scarcely mattered where you positioned the 2010 Pakistan team in the field, so woeful was their catching) but he certainly set his own bowling patterns. Post ban I wonder if he still does? Maybe now he just bowls where his captains and coaches tell him to bowl, running to the comfort of the orders of an authority figure when under pressure — and so doing giving up his greatest advantage: his cricketing brain? His ban, after all, was for allowing someone else to tell him where to bowl: maybe now there’s a comfort in bowling where the powers that be say you should?

Or maybe I’m talking nonsense and he is in total control of where to put the ball, and he’s just lost the knack. Or maybe it’s all about confidence, and his loss of it, and everything I mention above is just a manifestation of that. Maybe he was never as brilliant as I thought: he was just on a hotstreak and my mind filled in the rest because it wanted to see brilliance in him. That seems to be Samiuddin’s take.

It doesn’t really matter. He seems, as far as one can tell, happy, and for all the happiness he brought to so many people, myself included, he deserves that. Equally for his sins he probably deserved to lose the part of his career he did, and everything that came with it. Although as Samiuddin points out the fact that so many have suffered so much less for doing so much worse makes that hard to entirely accept.