Beguiling spin bowler with a volatile temper was sent home from NZ tour
Abdul Qadir, who has died aged 63 from a heart attack, owed his development on and off the cricket pitch to Imran Khan, the Oxfordeducated captain of Pakistan who had extensive social connections and who is now the country’s prime minister.
One of the game’s finest spin bowlers in the 1980s, Qadir was introduced to a glamorous array of people far removed from the povertystricken environment in which he grew up in Lahore. Imran held his hand in London, taking him to parties and treating him like a child or, as their team-mate Wasim Raja reckoned, like an unpaid servant.
The two men were as compelling a couple on the field as on
London’s social scene: one all grace and athleticism in his fast bowling, the other beguiling batsmen with an array of legspinning tricks.
Qadir named one of his four sons after Imran, who in turn referred to him as ‘‘a genius’’. Whereas the captain had received an education, in academic work and cricket, of the highest quality, Qadir was self-taught. He did not play the game until he was 12 and would experiment continually. ‘‘I used to go to bed with a ball and as I was falling asleep would imagine various grips and what the ball would do,’’ he said.
Qadir was 27 when his life was reshaped by Imran. For the next eight years and, indeed, until the emergence of the Australian Shane Warne, he was regarded as arguably the finest of all leg spinners, having done much to revive the art.
Graham Gooch, then at his peak as an England batsman, thought Qadir had a better disguised googly – a ball that appears to be a leg break but spins the other way – and top spinner than Warne. ‘‘He’d show you a googly you could read,’’ Gooch explained. ‘‘Then he would bowl one you suspected of being a googly, but weren’t sure about. Then he’d send down one you’d be completely bamboozled by, but it would usually turn out to be another googly. These were all bowled with a different action, to complement his leg break, top spinner and flipper.’’
In addition, Qadir bowled with great control. Had he been playing with the Decision Review System, the technological aid available today, he would probably have taken even more wickets; as it was, he took 236 wickets in 67 test matches at an average of 32.80, with a further 132 wickets in one-day matches. His career came to an end only because of the emergence of another fine leg spinner, Mushtaq Ahmed, who learnt much of his art through watching Qadir.
Abdul Qadir was one of four children raised in a small house in Dharampura, Lahore. His father, Hafiz Syed Qadeem, had migrated to the city and earned a pittance reading prayers at a mosque. Hafiz had barely enough money to raise a family, and they sometimes went without meals; he certainly had no interest in sport. His son’s potential as a bowler was spotted at the local cricket club, which led to an offer of a place at Government College in Lahore.
Although he would go on to score two centuries during the course of his career, he paid scant attention to his batting, and concentrated on developing his bowling.
Qadir made his test debut in 1977 and took six England wickets for 44 in his second appearance, at Hyderabad. He did not secure his place in the Pakistan side until Imran became captain in 1982. That summer, frenzied appealing was a less attractive element of his wonderful bowling. In the Lord’s test he continued to demand that an umpire give Ian Botham out after one animated request had been turned down. The umpire threatened to suspend play if the Pakistanis did not calm down.
He once claimed in a television discussion on ball tampering that every successful Pakistani bowler had been guilty at one time or another.
He punched a gloating spectator in the West Indies – which cost the Pakistan Cricket Board a considerable sum – and in 1985 was sent home from a tour of New Zealand. He had been sent off the field by his captain, Zaheer Abbas, for lack of effort. After he refused to apologise, he was put on the first available flight home.
‘‘He is temperamental even for a Pakistani,’’ John Woodcock, cricket correspondent of The Times, wrote in Wisden, ‘‘but in the pantheon of leg spinners he surely ranks near the very top.’’
Through a combination of his zest, strong fingers and supple right wrist, Qadir took 18 wickets in three test matches in 1983-84, inspiring Pakistan to victory, and 30 wickets when England next toured in 1987-8, including his best figures of nine for 56 in the test in his home city of Lahore. ‘‘Did you pick my googly?’’ he would tease David Gower.
He missed the start of Pakistan’s tour of England in 1987 because his wife, Meena, was said to be ‘‘possessed by demons’’. He had married her when he was 15 and never introduced her to his captain because she rarely left home. She survives him. Their sons, Rehman, Imran, Sulaman and Usman, all played first-class or List A cricket. They had two daughters, Noor Fatima and Noor Aamina, who is married to another Pakistani cricketer, Umar Akmal.
By 1989 Qadir’s powers were waning. He fell out with Imran, returned home from the tour of Australia before the first test was even played, and claimed in a television discussion on ball tampering that every successful Pakistani bowler had been guilty at one time or another. The national broadcaster said he was ‘‘damaging national pride’’ and dropped him from the panel.
In retirement he briefly became chairman of the national selectors, continued to pray for Imran and had a mural made of his former captain in a marriage hall that he owned; he also ran a sports shop and an independent cricket academy in Lahore.
To the cricketing fraternity, Qadir remained a star. England all-rounder Derek Pringle once wrote: ‘‘I can remember thinking I had played against some damned good players, but I’d never come up against anyone like Qadir. It was sobering, bewildering and more than a little frustrating being confronted by somebody to whom you had no answer.’’ –