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Why do we love Mr Akhtar despite everything?

achilles

By achilles
in Cricket Talk

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achilles

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Cricket fans need to learn to stop worrying and just love the bomb that is Shoaib Akhtar. For a start, he is clearly never going away. Like with the pitiful Mike Atherton facing Glenn McGrath and the clueless Daryll Cullinan facing Shane Warne, all resistance is futile. But there is also something else: we must be honest about our feelings. We need the guy. Look at the last Pakistan v India match. Who else could have brought the best out of Harbhajan Singh and elevated a Punjabi cussing contest into a dialogue of such incandescent beauty it is up there with the great lyric poems of all time? A cricket world with Shoaib Akhtar in it is a better place than one without. Love him or hate him, he adds to the colour of the cricket, to the palette of possibility. He is like tabasco or tequila or, let me think, nandrolone. He is the foaming, freakish crank who sleeps and shouts at the end of your road through the night, and you and the other neighbours complain about him, but when he's gone, for some reason you wish he wasn't. It helps that he's a fast bowler. The man has reduced his run-up, but he can still do it. If he couldn't, he wouldn't be there. The day he can no longer hit 90mph is the day he finally retires (or goes in for more liposuction; it's all in the aerodynamics, they say). It's a familiar experience for all who have followed cricket over the past five years: Shoaib turns up after a year-long break from the game in which he conducted minor flirtations with Bollywood and major ones with C-list actresses. We bore ourselves silly as we remember the injuries, the feigned injuries, the doping, the bat-butt slapping of Mohammad Asif, and the pushing of Bob Woolmer. This last one was the worst offence in my book. I mean, who would do that? Bob Woolmer was like a big cuddly teddy bear, but he also happened to be a genius. Shame on you, Shoaib. But then the Pindi Express starts running in. In his first few overs the run-up is still long enough to build up hope. Hope beyond hope. Boyish hope. Expectant hope. It builds and builds and the run-up is so bloody long in distance - and also now in time, since he has become the Pindi Slow Coach, stuttering to the crease - that you can't help but amuse yourself imagining the earth-shattering thunderbolt he might just hurl (letter writers: I said hurl, not chuck) straight into the foot of the stumps, or better still, bang into the batsman's throat. Pacers are few and far between these days, so even an aging - correction, aged - Shoaib Akhtar is must-see cricket. A genuinely fast bowler, especially one as crazy as Shoaib, makes us forget reason and past indiscretions, at least temporarily, at least at the moment of delivery. We're just an imperfectly evolved species (cricket fans are particularly imperfectly evolved): the adrenal glands break and our violent urges stomp all over the reasoned pleas of the pre-frontal cortex as we edge closer to the TV screen, waiting for some genuine action, hungry for thrills, even asking, like a diner politely requesting ketchup, for blood. So yes, despite myself I am a Shoaib Akhtar fan. He is still there, misunderstood and unflustered, talked about, laughed about, written off and vilified, striving for more than he can reach, dreaming of God knows what, thinking only of the next delivery and if he can make it, cursing and smiling and groaning from the deepest reaches of his soul by the middle of his first spell, proclaiming love for the game and knowing, despite all the doubters, that he believes it in his heart of hearts. There's a purity to his ugliness, he's irresistible in his disagreeability; his refusal to accept an average existence is as silly and compelling as the village madman who lives in a shed on his own doing strange things. Shoaib is an odd creature, in outward appearance verging on the monstrous, in inner life well beyond the modern conventions of pop-psychological analysis. And that's the point: in more ways than we realise, so am I, so are you, so is Pakistan, and so are all of us. We love Shoaib Akhtar because we see in him what we hide in ourselves: the ridiculous monster within that never dies and really just wants to be loved. (Or at least that's what Harbhajan must be thinking, eh?) Imran Yusuf works for the Express Tribune, an English-language newspaper in Pakistan From - Cricinfo

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