by Arunabha Sengupta
As a preparatory exercise before writing this, I turned to some YouTube clips of his bowling.
Was it to get it right? Perhaps.
The rhythm of the curiousness or the lack of it.
The rocking back and forth at the start, with one leg slightly bent, the ball twirling up with every anti-clockwise movement of his right hand, up to that unique beard of his where it was caught by his left.
The run up, the twists and turns, feet falling diagonally on either side o f the resultant 45-degree route to the crease, vigorous elbow action balancing out the veering.
Finally, that convoluted jump, arms in a whirl, that corkscrew release, the body tailing away, the tongue peeking out.
The post-script … the sudden, almost inevitable, breaking back from the motion, irrespective of the outcome, ready to pirouette and pivot towards the umpire in ardent appeal.
A spinner, a magician, a contortionist rolled into one, the shock of hair and the beard adding the touch of the wizard.
All that was missing was his cloak.
And to think all that was contrived, the action, the release, all to do with the psychology of batsmen. That is what he confessed to.
Even the beard.
Imran told him the beard made him look like a magician. Added to the effect.
The effect is still there.
Generally YouTube clips bore me.
I believe that they showcase the high points of past heroes, showing runs and wickets, moments of brilliance, seldom the failures, the play and miss outside the off-stump, or the rank bad full toss.
But there I was. Half an hour later.
Still looking at Abdul Qadir, a year after his death, as he repeatedly went through his run up.
Over and over again.
No, I was not really watching the clips to get the facts right.
I was there just for another glimpse of that action of his.
As expected, the clips were mostly of his bamboozling his victims. And there were many such successful moments. 236 of them in Test cricket, 132 in ODIs.
But I know he was not always successful.
I grew up watching him bowl against India. 27 wickets in 16 Tests at 51.51. Hardly figures to be excited about.
But, there was no lack of magic.
It was always there.
Even if he was being taken for runs.
In one of the YouTube clips, Kim Hughes was bowled off a googly, comprehensively fooled.
In another, the same batsman was beaten because of a horrendous attempt to punish a full-toss across the line from outside the off-stump.
In both cases, the effect was of a magician in action.
Once for real, once completely illusory.
Such was the effect of the man and his tricks.
Yes, he was the only spinner to draw crowds to the grounds and in front of television sets in an era when the art of slow bowling was stumbling to find a foot-hold —in a world over-run by fast men and limited-overs matches.
He was a bloody good leg-spinner with a googly that turned a mile.
At the same time he did not have great figures in any country but his own.
168 wickets at 26.82 at home, 68 at 47.58 away.
Averaging 61 in Australia, 69 in India.
There have been way more successful bowlers.
Of course it helped that the only team against whom he averaged less than 30 were England.
82 wickets at 24.98 meant the English writers never stopped writing about him.
Vic Marks spent honed his writing skills by describing how Qadir beat him in flight.
Bob Taylor spoke of sweeping a googly for four all the while thinking it was a leg-break.
As is often the case, success against England perhaps made him into a greater bowler than he really was.
But no one could exaggerate the sorcery that he worked while he bowled.
A magician whose feet were firmly on the ground.
“Only those who are less educated in cricket, when they have to keep speaking while giving commentary, only they say things like ‘that was a great top-spinner’.”
He did not believe such a thing existed.
The illusionist of cricket had no illusions about what he could do and what he could not.
My younger days.
Two of us at the nets. I was batting. My friend was running up to bowl innocuous medium pace. He was getting tired. No other bowler in view.
“Can you bowl a bit of spin?” I asked.
“No, I don’t know how to turn a ball,” he replied. “I just know that you have to dance.”
Instantly I understood. He had grown up, as I had done, watching Qadir.
Of course, we watched other spinners. Dilip Doshi, John Emburey … as distant from dancing as humanly possible.
But it was Qadir who defined spin.
Who made it interesting.
He was copied too. By youngsters across borders, at least by tens of thousands across one particular border.
From among those tens of thousands emerged Mushtaq Ahmed. And then Danesh Kaneria.
The torch was kept burning.
Qadir did not let this magical cricketing art disappear. Being a magician himself, it probably hurt his code.
Abdul Qadir was born on 15 Sep 1955.