‘Cricket is turning out to be a girlie game’
TIMES NEWS NETWORK FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2003 03:45:29 AM ]
They call him the Rawalpindi Express, but Shoaib Akhtar is concerned that fast bowlers might someday become extinct. The Pak paceman talks to Suresh Nair
He is no stranger to being fined and banned for being at the wrong end of ICC’s code of conduct. “Cricket is turning out to be a girlie game,” wails Shoaib Akhtar, his bizarre British accent hardly disguising a streak of angst. “There are so many restrictions. You can’t pull your hair, you can’t tug at your shirt… But cricket won’t be the same without fast bowlers. And if all this is taken away from us, we will be like dinosaurs. You will soon only find fossils of fast bowlers!”
The Rawalpindi Express is a restless man even as he hangs out at the poolside of the Taj. “I think it was Tony Greig who gave me that nickname,” says Shoaib whose high speed deliveries have brought him bouquets and brickbats in equal measure. “Speed is a key factor in my life. I like to drive fast, do bungee jumping – anything that gets my adrenaline pumping.” Not surprisingly, he admits that speeding on London roads did land him in trouble on one occasion. “But the cops let me go, saying they prefer to see me speeding on the grounds, not on the roads.”
However, on the cricket ground, his 40-yard run up leads to other kind of problems. And they show up usually in his display of aggression and verbal spats with batsmen who dare to strike out at his pace. “Like my body temperature is 102 degrees at that point of time. While that should make most people sick, it’s bound to bring out some amount of aggression in me.”
In other words, he can’t help it if he hurls the ball and then hurls abuses at the batsman. “It’s annoying when you run up forty yards and somebody hits you across the boundary. But I always accuse myself than anybody else. So my anger is usually directed at myself not the batsman. In fact, when that happens with tail-enders, I just walk away instead of expressing any kind of anger. I am too big for them, right? But I’ve had my bad days.”
The anger, says Shoaib, isn’t any special while playing against India. “My focus is on getting people out,” he admits, though it wasn’t a happy moment when Sachin Tendulkar mauled his bowling at Centurion Park during the World Cup in South Africa. “I wasn’t fit enough to play in the World Cup,” he reasons. “I had a knee problem and I was trying to do something extra for my country. But Sachin is an all-time great. Those who dispute that fact, I tell them to find someone else who’s scored 12,000 runs in the game and then talk to me. But the next time we face each other, I will try to get him out.”
He’s not familiar with Bollywood, though he hung out with Sanjay Dutt and gang at Durban during the World Cup. “I also met Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan,” he says but hesitates to discuss any of the actresses. “Yeah, I met some of them. Karisma, Kareena, Raveena…” In other words, either he didn’t have enough time to bowl them over or he ain’t telling. ”We’re playing cricket all through the year,” he says. “There’s no time. I just get a week off with my family. That’s it. I think we play too much cricket.”
