Wasim Akram

▪ 2000

      Even by his own volatile standards, Wasim Akram had an eventful year in 1999. In the summer Wasim led his highly gifted young Pakistani players to the final of the cricket World Cup, where inexperience and the old mental frailties of the Pakistan side emerged in their defeat by Australia. Earlier, in the inaugural Asian Test cricket championship, he had become not only the first Pakistani bowler to take a hat trick but also—having taken another in the next Test—the only bowler in history to achieve hat tricks in back-to-back Tests. Throughout the year Pakistan cricket was dominated by allegations of match fixing, in which Wasim was implicated but never charged. He was officially cleared in September.

      Wasim was born June 3, 1966, in Lahore, Pak., into an upper-middle-class family and was brought up in the comfortable suburb of Modeltown. His father was a successful businessman, and Wasim was sent to the Cathedral School in Lahore, where his main sporting obsession was table tennis. From the age of 10, he lived with his grandparents, who lived closer to the school, and his grandfather, a passionate cricket follower, introduced Wasim to the sport. He studied fine arts at Islamia College, Lahore, but his success in local club cricket brought him to the attention of the state selectors and the international side. He made his first-class, international one-day, and Test debuts within the space of three months at the turn of the 1984–85 season and, barring periods of injury or political upheaval, was thereafter a regular member of the Pakistan side. Polite and eloquent, Wasim was a great favourite in all parts of the world, most notably in England, where he produced several devastating performances with both bat and ball for his county, Lancashire.

      Although his staccato run-up and hurried delivery stride betrayed the lack of proper coaching early in his career, by the end of the 1998–99 season, Wasim, a left-arm fast bowler capable of moving the ball late both in the air and off the pitch with subtle changes of pace, had taken more than 370 Test wickets and was on course to be the most prolific wicket taker in the history of Test cricket. In a tumultuous era of Pakistan cricket, he had also proved himself a skilled survivor, returning to captain the national team three times, having been appointed first in the 1992–93 season, when he was only 27. Wasim had yet to prove himself a brilliant captain, but his command of his team at the 1999 World Cup was absolute and, at times, inspired. Meanwhile, his batting, always aggressive and often destructive, put him firmly into the all-rounder class once occupied by such greats as his Pakistani mentor, Imran Khan, Ian Botham of England, and Sir Richard Hadlee of New Zealand.

Andrew Longmore

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