Pakistan spinner Abrar Ahmed on Friday enjoyed a dream start to his international career picking up 7/114 on his Test debut. Abrar, 24, bamboozled the England batters with his variations and ran through their star-studded batting line-up to bowl the hosts out for 281 on the first day of the Multan Test. Not only did Abrar become the 13th Pakistan cricketer to claim a five-wicket-haul on debut, the youngster created history by being the first to do so inside the first session on the opening day. Abrar was on a role. And England had no answer.
As it turns out, the ground on which he grabbed his first-ever international five-for, Abrar has a long 18-year-old connection with. During India’s historic tour of Pakistan, when Virender Sehwag smashed his famous triple century scoring 309, left an impact on a then-young Abrar. Of all the bowlers Sehwag smashed, he was the most brutal on Saqlain Mushtaq, the current head coach of the Pakistan Cricket team, and as the carnage unfolded in Multan, Abrar took notes.
“I still remember it was the Multan Test, where Virender Sehwag smashed that triple hundred, and he attacked Saqlain Mushtaq the most. Abrar was about six, and he used to point out mistakes in Saqlain bhai’s bowling. My father got so annoyed because of his running commentary that he locked him in another room,” recalls Abrar’s brother Sajid in a conversation with news agency.
When Abrar picked up his seventh wicket on Day 1, it looked as if he was on his way to join Jim Lanker, Anil Kumble and Ajaz Patel before the last three wickets were scalped by leg-spinner Zahid Mahmood. Else, what a debut it would have been, one that would have been highly unlikely to be duplicated.
Five years ago, in 2017, when Abrar had first made headlines in the PSL representing the Karachi Kings, Sajid recalls how Mushtaq Ahmed, the former Pakistan spinner who was then the coach of the Pakistan National Cricket Academy, had asked Abrar about Abdul Qadir. And the name did not ring a bell to the then-19-year-old. “Do you know who is Abdul Qadir?”. Abrar came replied: “Ye kaun hai, kabhi naam nahi suna (Who is he, never heard his name).”
“Everyone started laughing and Mushtaq bhai told him ‘You’ve registered yourself as a leg-spinner and you don’t know about the greatest we ever produced. When he narrated this story to us, we also started laughing. Bachpan se itni deewangi cricket ko le kar aur itne bade legend ko nahi jaanta (He was so passionate about cricket since childhood, but had no clue about such a legend),” mentioned Sajid.
And he did something even the legendary Qadir couldn’t – enter the history books in his first-ever Test.