INZAMAM-UL-HAQ woke up on May 3 to realize that he was now no more anybody but somebody in international cricket. His already big stature grew huge in size in a matter of just 24 hours.
The 32-year-old Pakistani vice-captain played a phenomenal innings of 329 on May 3, but missed Brian Lara’s world record of 375 and Hanif Mohammad’s Pakistan record of 337. Nevertheless, it was the 10th biggest individual innings in the history of Test cricket that lasted nine hours and 39 minutes, included 38 boundaries and nine sixes from 436 balls.
It was an innings full of character, defiance, guts, discipline, commitment and maturity. Reduced to a one-legged existence after Stephen Fleming disallowed him a runner — an unsporting decision, to say the least — Inzamam hobbled between the wickets for the last 139 minutes of his innings and, with a restricted footwork, managed to add 108 runs. With the assistance of the lower-half batsmen, he added 244 runs, with his own contribution being 148.
The diehard fans of the game still contest Imran Khan’s decision of declaring the innings when Javed Miandad was on 280 against India at Hyderabad. The debate still goes unabated whenever Miandad’s name comes into discussion.
The same fate would haunt Inzamam’s fans, not to mention the man himself. The ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ of cricket come into debate. If Shoaib Akhtar had stayed a bit longer, if Fleming had allowed a runner, and if Inzamam had not tried one shot one too many in Brooke Walker’ over, what might have happened?
The unassuming Inzamam, Pakistan’s backbone in batting, simply sums up the debate, saying he is happy with 329 and would do his best to better Lara’s feat in the future.
Although there is going to be a lot of pain in the days to come realizing that Inzamam missed a lifetime’s opportunity to break the record, there is a lot of sense of relief that he has at last justified his talent. Zaheer Abbas, in particular, will be a proud man because he was the one who had pinned his hopes on Inzamam to threaten Brian Lara’s 375. Zaheer had made the prediction in this newspaper column in May 1995 — almost a week after Lara made the record against England at St John’s, Antigua, in April 1995.
Zaheer may be credited for picking the right person to take a shot at the world record. But not many would know that it was Ishaq Patel, a low profile gentleman who works behind the scene, who had spotted Inzamam at an early age of 18. Ishaq took him under his wings, kept him in his house, looked after his training before throwing him in the Under-19 cricket. In 1989-90, it was Ishaq who took him to United Bank where Inzamam blossomed as a cricketer before making a real impression in the home series against Sri Lanka. After repeated failures in the 1992 World Cup, Inzamam took the world by storm by playing match-winning innings in the semi-final against New Zealand and then in the final against England.
Inzamam made a lacklustre Test debut when he scored only 66 in his first six innings on the 1992 tour to England. He was eventually dropped from the fifth Test at The Oval. But he regained his place on the subsequent tours to New Zealand and the West Indies where he scored his first century (123) at Georgetown, Guyana. From then on, there has been no stopping him, and, barring 1998, there has been no calendar year in which he has not scored a century. In 1998, his top score was 97 in the drawn Test at Lahore against Australia.
Inzamam has been compared with Indian Sachin Tendulkar and West Indian Lara. But even his biggest supporters admit that he has been an underachiever and has not lived upto his enormous talent and reputation. Prior to the current Lahore Test, Inzamam had 5,600 runs in 80 Tests with 15 centuries and six nervous nineties. His only real big innings was 200 not out against Sri Lanka in the Asian Test Championship final at Dhaka, in March 1999. And after that, the second biggest knock was 177 against the West Indies, at Rawalpindi in 1997. The analysis confirms that he struggles to keep the momentum going and throws away bright starts. But this innings has certainly showed that he has learnt the art of carrying the brittle, fragile and unpredictable Pakistan middle-order on his shoulders.
Many of his detractors or critics might argue that Inzamam’s 329 was against an attack lacking in penetration, bite and killing instinct in the absence of Shane Bond, Chris Cairns and Dion Nash. But the bottomline is, if it was such a feeble attack, why not the rest of the batsmen got big hundreds. It may not be out of context to mention here that after Inzamam’s 329, the innings of note was played by opener Imran Nazir who struck 127 in his comeback Test. The third biggest score was by the No 10 batsman, Shoaib Akhtar, who scored 37 while none of the specialist batsmen reached 30.
“My feet are still on the ground. I am enjoying my moment. But at the same time there is a feeling that now I have to work even harder to live up to the expectations of my fan club,” Inzamam said. After a reflective pause he added: “It is very easy to rise, but every difficult to stay there. But I am confident because I have firm belief in the Almighty who has helped me throughout my career and would continue to do so in the future.”
INZAMAM-UL-HAQ woke up on May 3 to realize that he was now no more anybody but somebody in international cricket. His already big stature grew huge in size in a matter of just 24 hours.
