One of the massive bonuses of watching live cricket is the experience of listening to the great detail about personal anecdotes of the game.
During the second Test match between England and Pakistan at Southampton, former pacer Wasim Akram revealed about the batsman who played his reverse swing the best.
Akram, along with his partner-in-crime Waqar Younis, were the best proponents of the reverse swing the game has ever seen.
Pakistan’s 1990 tour of New Zealand was memorable for the deadly duo wreaking havoc in the Kiwi camp, as the two shared 39 wickets between them.
Wasim and Waqar had the wood over the Kiwi batters in that series, barring Martin Crowe. The middle-order batsman amassed 244 runs in the-three match affair, at an average of 61.
“I think the ball used to get reverse after five-six overs, don’t ask me why. It was against New Zealand and Waqar got 30 [29] wickets in three Test matches and I got 16 [10] in two and got injured. Martin Crowe got two hundreds [one hundred],” Wasim recalled in the Sky Sports commentary box.
“And ‘I asked him after the series, ‘What’s your secret?’ He said, ‘I just try to play you on the front foot and I play for the in-swingers every time and the out-swingers automatically miss the edge’,” he added.
Earlier in June this year, popular England commentator, David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd talked about Wasim’s liking for bowling with the old ball, during his stint at Lancashire. And the rest of his peers complained about it, asking for newer cherries.
“Wasim Akram used to look in the ball bag and just come out with the worst ball he could find, a real scruffy ball so he could practise reverse swing,” Lloyd said during a Sky Sports’ show ‘Watchalong’.
“All the rest of the lads would say, ‘Look at these, we can’t bowl with these – we want some new balls,’ and Akram would look at the bag and bring one out and would just work on that skill of reverse swing,” Lloyd concluded.
