Who would want to be a left-arm spinner? No, really, who?
When you are growing up and just starting to play cricket with a little seriousness, and you look at all the kinds of cricketers that you love watching, would you really want to choose left-arm spin?
Opening batsmen are heroes, stout or flashy, but heroes.
Middle order men are the moneymakers.
Fast bowlers are studs.
Off-spinners are cool again and leg-spinners are fast bowling studs in disguise.
With all due respect to Bishen Bedi and almost all of Bangladesh, left-arm spinners are those who could not bat, or bowl quick.
You feel sorry for them, as you might for the downtrodden.
“What do you bowl?”
“Left-arm spin.”
“Oh, I’m sorry …”
Which is why there are few more heartwarming sights in cricket than the successes of one of the breed. And something about Zulfiqar Babar makes you feel sorry for him, reflexively.
He is old, among the oldest to debut for Pakistan.
For a long time, he had given up on the game because he felt the game had given up on him. He had lost a dear mentor and he came from Okara, which is a district Pakistan’s selectors do not generally scour for talent.
The only other Test cricketer from Okara is Israr Ali, who played back in the 1950s and, of course, he did not bowl left-arm spin. (Left-arm medium pace, if you are asking.)
Babar looks like a cricketer in the sense that your uncle looks like one and if you acknowledge that, then it is clear that he should bowl what he does.
He has an action which, in its build-up, threatens to turn into that frog in a blender, but he rescues it partially at delivery.
The thing is he can bowl and he does it, like all good left-arm spinners, when you are not watching, because, again, who watches them bowl?
He bowled 17 overs on Monday and most of the time, all eyes were at the other end; Junaid Khan looks good, Mohammad Irfan looks very good and, of course, there is Saeed Ajmal and where is the first-choice left-arm spinner Abdur Rehman, anyway?
Mostly Babar looked a little left-arm spinner-ish. He changed the angles of his run-up a few times but batsmen just tried to bully him. Even a man as impeccably polite as Hashim Amla played him pretty impolitely, scooping him over cover easily and regularly.
JP Duminy was downright contemptuous. He jumped down the pitch to him and then began sweeping him mercilessly. Left-arm spinners, each boundary seemed to say, are pointless.
Until Babar’s 18th over, when Duminy swept again but could only top-edge to square leg. And then how could your heart not warm to this man?
It was a wonderful moment, all the more for its unexpectedness. Then came Babar’s revenge, except that it was not, because revenge is enacted upon another and implies a degree of malice.
As he dismissed Faf du Plessis and then Robin Peterson, both in classic fashion, this was an act purely for himself and his kind.
Not only did it prove that he deserved to be playing, it went another step to proving how valuable left-arm spin actually is, specialist left-arm spin, not all-rounders who bowl, not part-timers, but specialist left-arm spin that looks to take wickets.
Dale Steyn tried to put him in his place as the day ended. But to Babar these blows were little pin-pricks, the tiniest scars of a battle he had already won.
Who would want to be a left-arm spinner? Zulfiqar Babar, clearly, who does not mind being one, one little bit.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
