ike a drone, the end was hovering. And like a drone, I think it may have crept up on Mohammad Amir, perhaps even during the course of our conversation, gliding in from the periphery of his consciousness. The end end - a hard exit from the game - is still not here. But when we met two months before last year's World Cup, in Dubai, Amir talked himself into the revelation that he'd had enough. If he didn't get picked for the World Cup, he'd retire. And even if he did, he might retire after it. Either way, an exit was looming.
The recorder was off by this stage. But given that he did retire from Tests soon after and that he's now, effectively, freelancing for Pakistan rather than employed by them, this doesn't feel like a betrayal of confidence.
It had crept up. The year before, Amir had already spoken of managing his workload, by playing fewer Tests, itself a pronouncement that doused rumours he wanted to quit altogether. Pakistan were cool on the idea, then acquiesced by not picking him for five home Tests (in the UAE) in late 2018, but took him to South Africa. As much as acquiescence it was acknowledgment of a new reality that the once vast horizon of Amir's bowling had been hemmed in. There were limits to what he could do, to what he wanted to do.
Those would never have felt more constraining than in March last year. Since the 2017 Champions Trophy final, Amir had picked up five wickets in 15 ODIs. That encompassed a stretch in which he took one wicket in nine ODIs. The format is no friend to bowlers but somewhere across New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Dubai and South Africa, against opponents including Hong Kong, it must yield more than the solitary wicket of Zimbabwe's No. 10, Tendai Chatara (batting average 6.6), no? For your sweat, your skills, your genius? That is a run from hell and then some.
People talk after that kind of run. Players hear that kind of talk. A great deal of Amir's building frustration was with the criticism. Taking wickets was a difficult business and not taking wickets even more so and people didn't get it.
In the 17 years since he first moved to Rawalpindi to pursue cricket seriously, Amir's career could have ended at any number of moments, in any number of ways
"I wanted to talk about this," he simmered. "Everyone has an opinion, that's fine. Last Test series [in South Africa, where he took 12 cheap but not especially impactful wickets] my performance wasn't bad. In T20s I am probably the top Pakistan bowler. ODIs sure, last 12-14 matches haven't been great.
"People can talk but not many see that since I've returned, I've been playing constantly, across all formats, playing and playing. And after a long break, doing that, the body, the mind, the tactics, all are affected. It has to. It could've been in Tests, in T20s or in ODIs. But somewhere it had to take a toll. Your body gets tired, your mind gets tired.
"All I can do is keep trying and giving everything to it. Maybe this is a time when things just aren't happening for me."
The point about the physical toll was valid. From his return till the day we spoke, only seven fast bowlers had bowled more overs. But actually it was the load in the first year of his return that had been overbearing, more than anybody realised. In that year, no fast bowler played more international matches and only Josh Hazlewood bowled more overs. No bowler on that list - fast, medium, slow, righty, leftie, tall, short, fat, thin, white, brown, black - was coming off a near five-year break in which they had not bowled at all.
In hindsight, it was that first year back that broke Amir and only now does it come across as truly negligent that Pakistan had no plan to ease him in. No plan, that is, other than to play him in every game possible - he missed only five matches all year - as if squeezing five years' worth of bowling inside a year.
But he was housing a deeper frustration, more complicated because the focus was inwards. Amir was, I think, coming to terms with what he was, as against what he could have been. Or maybe he was coming to terms with the divergence between what he had always known himself to be and what people remembered him to be. Because, though it could be argued that this run of form was an outlier, it could equally be argued that it was a caricature of the broader sense that this Amir was not that Amir. And then we're a reasonable extrapolation away from the conclusion that that Amir never existed.
The memory of that Amir is clearest from one ball, or rather one kind of ball. If you could rank by evocativeness, by the yearning they generate, all the deliveries in the world, Amir's inswing would be top. It is the delivery that most triggers Pakistani fans, sightings of it even now making cricket alive and vital like little else. It's the Shane Watson dismissal at Lord's a decade ago, leg-before and bowled in one ball, or Mitchell Johnson castled in the next Test, at Headingley.
These were deliveries that swooped upon a batsman, with the grace of a bird of prey unerringly picking up a tiny morsel off the ground and soaring back up; these deliveries looked like they gathered momentum off the bounce. Not least of the genius was in the precision - controlling swing is barely in nature's control, let alone man's.
They were transcendental, no longer mere deliveries from bowler to batsman. They were engagement, a physical experience, because the stomach traced their trajectory as if on a roller coaster. They were powerful markers in the life of a nation, powerful enough to lift dark clouds, to find light at the end of tunnels, to help you sleep, to give you reason to wake up. Pakistan was a grim country around that time, but in the millisecond existence of those deliveries, it was the greatest place - or at least it was polite enough to fade into the background.
And because memory is but the grandest deceit, those came to be deliveries we remembered Amir bowling all the time.
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Amir, before and after his ban
And now he wasn't bowling them all the time. Now he was bowling them once a year. A few strung together to Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli at the Asia Cup, a couple again in the Champions Trophy final (more than the swing, this was about occasion), a ball to Jonny Bairstow at Lord's, two in the first over of a PSL game in 2020.
In between was a lot of reality. Barely three wickets a Test, an average over 31 and a wicket every 11 and a half overs worth of reality. Five-wickets-in-15-ODIs reality. At no point did Amir look like a bowler somebody could take apart, or one who was out of place. But he rarely looked like a bowler who could take others apart. The swing - no, the swoop that took you along - had gone. Some friends of mine on WhatsApp had begun to despair of Amir's bowling: seedhi seedhi - as straight as a boy scout, no swing, no movement, nothing. Curves ironed out meticulously like wrinkles from a shirt.
Where had it gone? How had it gone? Why had it gone?
There were no obvious answers. The wrist wasn't as rigidly locked in as before, slow-mo cameras revealed. He wasn't delivering from as close to the stumps as he used to. The most interesting were discussions around the lengths he was now bowling, especially in Tests. In short, went the diagnosis, he wasn't full enough for long enough. If only he went a little fuller, especially in his first spells. If only he didn't slip back to a shorter length so quickly, one that would keep batsmen honest but not necessarily see them off.
This wasn't armchair sniping alone. Azhar Mahmood, Pakistan's bowling coach through much of Amir's return, would often sit in the pavilion and predict exactly how soon and often Amir would switch to back of a length. People cribbed that Amir was doing this to protect his figures, that his concern wasn't with taking wickets but with buttressing his economy. The perceived crime here was not so much one of selfishness - that he was looking after his own figures - as much as the betrayal of a tradition. How could a Pakistani fast bowler not be bowling full, because to bowl full is to attack, and if you're a Pakistani fast bowler who's not attacking then you're not Pakistani or fast: you're just some '80s county trundler.
Didn't Amir in that first golden year bowl full all the time? Isn't that what brought him the swing? Go full boy, and see what the sky and clouds give you, because the earth underneath ain't giving you nothing.
"One single guy with 220 million hopes behind him, he has to win a match - people have to understand it isn't easy"MOHAMMAD AMIR
Except that, one, length is hardly binary, where, say, full is good and anything that's not is bad. It has never been as simple as that. Conditions, circumstances, the kind of ball being used, the opponent - there's so much else that goes into the length of one single ball. An often overlooked stat was that in 11 of the first 14 Tests Amir played, he had Mohammad Asif at the other end, as accomplished a pressure-building partner a bowler could hope to have as any. Amir's figures in those Tests may as well be of another bowler: over four wickets per Test, an average under 30, a wicket every 53 balls, nearly two overs quicker than his overall figures.
But, two, there is no evidence that Amir did bowl fuller more often in that first year. The memory, see? According to ESPNcricinfo's ball-by-ball data, nearly a fifth (19.35%) of all his deliveries in Tests post-ban have been full (including full tosses and yorkers). Pre-ban, less than 5% of his deliveries were as full. Even accounting for the subjectivity of ball-by-ball scorers, that is a big difference. Looking at his use of the new ball doesn't make a difference. Before the ban, under 3% of his deliveries with the new ball (from overs 1-20) were classed as full. After it, nearly a fifth again.
Neither does changing the lengths we're looking at. Let's expand the parameter for full to also include good-length deliveries, which, as Asif and Glenn McGrath forever remind us, are as much the bedrock of attacking bowling. That leaves us with the not wholly unreasonable argument that in most conditions, bowling back of a length with a new ball can be construed as a defensive move. Before his ban nearly 35% of Amir's deliveries were classified as back, or short, of a length; after his ban this fell to 21%.
This kind of data is not for everyone. But it's undeniable that the two Amirs are different. Which brings us back again to this: What if the "what if" we posit about Amir is the wrong one? What if it isn't "What if Amir had not been banned then how good would he have been"? What if it is that that Amir never existed but for a brief, glorious period? What if that Amir existed because he played all but three of his Tests in Australia, New Zealand and England, and that in the English summer of 2010 the ball swung like a chandelier in a hurricane? What if that Amir was good, but not as good as we thought? That he was flattered by the conditions he played in, the bowlers he played alongside?
Amir defended his bowling in much the same way that all athletes do their poor performances - they are trying, it's the process that's important, bad times come to all, numbers don't tell the full story. But the more we spoke, the more he seemed to be arriving at that "what if", the right one, and even a broader disaffection.
People remember that 2010 summer, I prompted.
"That cricket has changed, those conditions have changed, people have to understand that."
He was almost pleading.
"That year everyone swung the ball. The wickets, the overhead conditions. Now the wickets have changed. Tell me how much does Mitchell Starc swing the ball? [Trent] Boult swings it in conditions where there is a little swing. I think he's the No. 1 bowler in the world, but conditions make a difference. In Ireland, in England, in South Africa, I swung the ball. When it doesn't swing in conditions for swing, then, sure, that is a problem.
"But playing a lot of cricket takes a toll. After playing without a break, the body is tired, the mind is tired."
Do you think those old memories of Amir are a burden?
"I wouldn't say burden exactly but yeah, people's hopes from me are higher."
Why aren't you doing what you did to Watson or Johnson in 2010?
"People have to understand that age, rhythm… I had played consistently then and had a rhythm about my bowling, a confidence. Now I am back and things change. That is life. I'm nine years older. I was 18, now I'm 27. The biggest loss I've had is my mother, who passed recently. Even having a daughter makes a difference.
"Ball in hand, playing - that isn't it for us, it isn't everything. There are a million things to manage in life, to look after family, the pressures of performance. Many things. One single guy with 220 million hopes behind him, he has to win a match - people have to understand it isn't easy."
A miracle kid: when Mohammad Amir first burst onto the scene, we all watched with our mouths agape, like Shane Watson here at Lord's, 2010 Tom Shaw / © Getty Images
Earlier this summer, a year on from when we spoke, Amir was cut from Pakistan's central contracts list. This was the official "We've-decided-to-move-on" moment. He initially made himself unavailable for Pakistan's current tour of England, for which he would only have been involved in the T20Is. His wife was expecting their second child and with quarantine requirements in place, it wasn't logistically feasible for him to be part of the series. But an early birth meant that he could play, a decade on from Lord's.
In the 17 years since he first moved to Rawalpindi to pursue cricket seriously, Amir's career could have ended at any number of moments, in any number of ways. Those early weeks in the big city, when he yearned for home; major back injuries; the fixing ban - this slow fade is an innocuous and unexpected way for it to go.
A story Amir has told many times is of the time he received his first Pakistan shirt. He couldn't stop looking at his name. He couldn't believe it was his name. He couldn't stop looking at himself wearing the shirt. He kept it on all night.
So often has he told it, it now comes out as practised as the jokes a husband and wife tell every new couple they befriend about each other. But he's still able to summon a genuineness in every retelling. There is no question it meant a lot to him. To go from that to the disaffection of that March day, it didn't seem right that this is how it might end. That for all he has overcome, he isn't the balloon that popped but the balloon that exhaled itself out of existence, floating this way and that until it wasn't.
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