Scholar Ansari is first-class talent
ALL-ROUNDER SET FOR ENGLAND DEBUT
England’s dressingroom brains trust will take on an extra dimension if Zafar ansari, the surrey spin- bowling all- rounder, makes his international debut against Ireland in Malahide a week on Friday.
ansari, who celebrated his callup with four Essex wickets at The Oval yesterday, graduated from Cambridge two years ago with a double first in politics and sociology. The 23-year-old is halfway through a 40,000-word Ma on the 1960s civil rights movement in the american south, and plays the piano to a high level.
It’s fair to say he would be England’s most academically gifted cricketer since Ed smith — another Cambridge double first — won three Test caps in 2003.
‘I think my surrey team-mates enjoy having someone to talk to about things they don’t think about or talk about necessarily,’ ansari told Sportsmail.
‘I try to use the studies to avoid taking cricket too seriously. Cricket is a sport and isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. My studies and cricket are tools for each other, and I do try to see them in those instrumental ways.’
ansari, part of a young England squad picked with the 2019 World Cup in mind, opens in four- day cricket for his county but bats in the middle order in limited-overs matches, bowls accurate left-arm spin and is an athletic fielder. England almost chose him for the Test tour of the Caribbean.
‘ Playing in dublin would be nerve-racking,’ he said. ‘But when it comes to one-day cricket I feel the gap between international and county isn’t as big as between Test cricket and the second division.’
ansari’s rise was accelerated by his five-wicket haul for Cambridge MCCU against surrey in 2011, when he removed Kevin Pietersen for 30 on the way to a 10-wicket win.
Pietersen, now a county teammate, was going through a difficult patch against left-arm spinners, but Ansari insists they have not spoken about the dismissal. ‘It’s never come up,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it was a touchy issue for him at the time, but it was a touchy issue in general. Anyone could have got him out, it just happened to be me.’
Ansari spent three weeks in Sri Lanka over the winter with England Performance Programme, where he talked about left-handed batting with Adam Lyth and Gary Ballance, and spin bowling with stephen Parry, Adil Rashid and Adam Riley.
He is juggling his time between playing for surrey and writing his dissertation at London’s Royal Holloway. He doesn’t rule out a Phd or a career in academia. If so, he would follow the path of his father, Professor Khizar Ansari, who hails from lahore in Pakistan, settled in England in his teens because his own father was an engineer in the British army, and was awarded an OBE 13 years ago for his work on race relations. Zafar’s English mother is an historian.
‘I’d love to give it a go with England,’ he said. ‘ Things can happen quickly. a couple of good performances and it starts to snowball.’
Between now and next Friday, the dissertation may have to wait its turn.