Asif, Aamer and Gul ask you if you enjoy fun
If you actually enjoy cricket, you can’t help but have enjoyed watching Mohammad Asif, Mohammad Aamer and Umar Gul bowl yesterday. It was better than spoon meat and carbonated dipping jam.
That they bowled Australia out for 88 was something of a bonus. Quite simply, this was cricket LIKE IT’S MEANT TO BE. These three bowlers actually had a choice as to what they did with the ball, swinging it in and out and seaming it as well. They didn’t just ‘put it in the right areas’ hoping for the best. They had plans, they were devious and they were flat-out ace.
It makes it so much more interesting. What will the next ball do? How will the batsman cope? There was no ‘plugging away outside off’. There was no ‘waiting for the bad ball’. There was an actual battle going on out there because for once it wasn’t a batsman with a tank and air strikes against a bowler with a blindfold on and his knees tied together.
It was Test cricket.
Not many countries can pick 17-year-olds to open the bowling for them, because not many countries have 17-year-olds who can scythe the ball past international opening batsmen and swing it both ways. Even that’s not enough to make Mohammad Aamer a fully-fledged Pakistani cricketer though. There’s more to it than that.