SPECTATOR SPORT
Lightning bowling
Frank Keating
TURN up or tune in to Lord's next Saturday for the NatWest cricket final and you will see the boy who could well become the fastest bowler in the history of the game. Indeed, he may already be so. On Saturday at St John's Wood, Hamp- stead's England discard, David Gower, will have many points to prove, but he could well have to get them across very lucidly against Surrey's whizzing prodigy from Pakistan, Waqar Younis. The 20- year-old does not leave much time for umming, and aahing. Waqar will also offer an ominous taster as to how next summer's tour to England by the vibrant Pakistan team could be more of a frantic duckers' and divers' hardhat carnival than even 1991's against Curtley and his chums from the Caribbean.
Legend has it that Imran Khan, warrior king and captain of Pakistan cricket, saw a teenaged tearaway snapping stumps like twigs in a televised schoolboy match trans- mitted from Sharjah in the Arabian Gulf, where the young man, son of an immigrant construction worker, was reared. Imran insisted at once the boy be allowed to join the senior Pakistan Test squad for training and 'assimilation'. Imran schooled him for a year, then suggested he join his old county in England, Sussex.
They turned their noses up down by the sea; but MiddleseX had a look and were at once very keen, and so were Surrey. When, early last summer, Surrey's over- seas Test fast bowler, Gray from Trinidad, cried off before a Cup qualifier against Lancashire, they took a chance and signed the tyro. Took a chance! Waqar's first wicket that morning was the former Eng- land opener, Fowler. Next match, against Yorkshire, two more top men, Moxon and Blakey, were back in the hutch before quarter-past eleven, both well and truly Waqared. Warnings bushfired round the shires. Batsmen armoured themselves like at Agincourt. Mr Gray was not heard of again at the Oval. Moxon had been lbw, Blakey clean bowled. This was relevant, for the young man — only 5ft 10ins, slimly athletic to the waist, but already with a classic fast bow- ler's bullocky rump on him — was to finish the season with 57 first-class wickets, an astonishing 29 of them clean bowled, and 21 leg before. He goes for a clean kill. No messing. As Arthur Carr, his captain, said of Larwood: `Lol was never much bothered with people being caught off his bowling. But whenever he hit the stumps a broad grin came across his face.' Last winter, Imran let loose his now bounding colt in Pakistan's two three- match rubbers against New Zealand and the West Indies. In the six Test matches he took 45 wickets at 14 runs apiece mind-boggling figures for a debutant and in the accompanying six one-day inter- nationals, 18 wickets at eight apiece. The Kiwis' captain and ace, Martin Crowe, said simply, `Waqar is easily the best and fastest I have ever faced.' The West Indies' opening bat, Desmond Haynes, concurred, almost. 'Apart from Michael [Holding] in his prime, nobody has been quicker or more dangerous through the air.'
The in-spearing yorker is so devastating- ly fast that at Worcester a couple of weeks ago, when he neck-and-cropped poor Brent, the apple-cheeked opener, the force of impact into the base of the stumps had the ball rebounding back to the bowler's end, and the bails, too, were seen to be flying forward. Many of Waqar's lbw deci- sions have come from literal foot-crushers — FBW: he broke Chris Cowdrey's toe last year. The other day, Dermot Reeve came out to face him with fast bowlers' metal toecaps screwed to his boots. So you are fearing a shattered ankle when, of a sudden, from his low trajectory he can at will get a cruelly fizzing 'length' ball to claw at your Adam's apple, or scarily singe the hairs on your nose.
David Gower's dearly longed-for return to a packed and devoted Lord's could be challenging, to say the least. How reward- ing — pigeon eats cat — to see him send a typically beguiling and unhurried, but de- fiant, message to the England selectors and also, re next summer, to Pakistan.
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