ICC Champions Trophy 2017: Mohammad Amir’s tale of Dostoyevskian redemption
Scene I
1st November 2011, Southwark Crown Court, England
Mohammad Amir, a young 18-year-old Pakistani boy, along with two of his teammates, is facing a criminal trial for cheating in a professional sport (taking payments to underperform during a Test series against England a year ago, to be precise). He has already been banned from playing cricket for five years. Now he faces the prospect of imprisonment.
The court proceedings get underway. The jury is convinced of these three Pakistani’s alleged role in what is called spot-fixing, an illegal act of stage managing the outcome of a specific part of a match (In Amir’s case, it is bowling no-balls in the fourth Test at the Oval in August 2010).
While the other two are sentenced to 30 and 12 months in prison, the teenager gets away with a six-month term behind the bars. Back home, he is declared a disgrace. It seems that a young talent has fallen into the pit of oblivion.
Scene II
18th June 2017, The Oval, England
The fallen teenager of 2010 is back. He is 25 now and set to open the bowling for his team against arch-rivals India in the final of the second most prestigious ICC ODI tournament. Pakistan have put up a mammoth 338/4 while batting first, but India have been their hoodoo team in big ICC matches.
Amir’s task is cut out.
He is up against Rohit Sharma, a batsman with two ODI double hundreds. Amir’s first delivery to Sharma is one which straightens up a bit after pitching. Sharma is unsettled by the pace. The next delivery is an away going one and Rohit lets it go.
The third bowl of the over swings in again. Sharma is late. He is struck on his pad. The umpire raises his finger. Amir has drawn the first blood.
In comes Virat Kohli, the dashing Indian skipper and a chaser extraordinaire. Amir tries to work him over by bowling at the fourth stump line, a line that has troubled the Indian run machine in the past. Amir finds Kohli’s edge only to see it getting grassed in the slips.
Will this cost his team dearly? No.
The day belongs to Amir. He induces another leading edge from the world No 1 batsman and this time it is taken at backward point. Kohli is gone and so are India’s chances. Amir has done it for his motherland. The fallen teenager is now a national hero.
Mohd Amir’s life story can be summed up in these two scenes. In the same country where he fell prey to the evil of spot-fixing scandal in 2010, he redeemed himself seven years later by helping his side clinch its first ICC ODI title since the World Cup victory of 1992 Down Under.
From being a villain, he rose to don the mantle of a saviour, a kind of transformation found in the characters of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s stories of redemption.
Also Read: Pakistan cricket team: The men who refused to give up!
The Innocent
Amir made his Test debut at a raw age of 17 against Sri Lanka in Galle. A discovery of fast bowling great Wasim Akram, who selected him from a pace camp in Lahore in 2007, he made a name for himself by claiming 55 wickets for National Bank of Pakistan in his first season of first-class cricket. Subsequently, he got a place in national team.
The left-armer played a stellar role in Pakistan’s T20 World Championship title triumph in England in 2009. He bowled some superb overs at the death throughout the event before scalping the leading run-getter of the tournament, Tillakaratne Dilshan, for a five-ball naught to pave the way for his team’s victory.
His reputation grew with time as he was able to master the art of both conventional and reverse swing. He troubled batsmen from Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Australia with his raw pace in Pakistan’s foreign tours. He appeared destined for greatness as he became the youngest bowler to claim 50 Test wickets during the tour of England in 2010.
The Fall
His world came crashing down after that. Pakistan’s tour of England in 2010 would always be a dark spot in the history of cricket. During the series, an expose from News of the World, a British newspaper, revealed the involvement of three Pakistani players namely; Salman Butt, Mohd Asif and Mohd Amir, in a spot-fixing scandal.
The undercover reporters of the newspaper were successful in filming a bookie called Mazhar Majeed revealing that pacers Asif and Amir would deliver no-balls at specific points in an over. The allegations led to Scotland Yard police arresting Majeed and the troika of Amir, Asif and Butt, who were facing bans from the International Cricket Council (ICC).
Though earlier Amir denied any involvement in the scandal, he went on to plead guilty later, accusing the skipper Salman Butt of influencing him. His juvenile status saw him escape with relatively lesser punishment than his two teammates.
The Redemption
Once he was released from the jail, Amir showed remorse and worked with the ICC to disseminate its anti-corruption message. Following the completion of his term of the ban, the speedster made a comeback to Pakistan’s ODI team for New Zealand in January 2016. He recorded moderate returns during the tour, though.
The comeback man finally came on his own during an Asia Cup T20 match against India on 27 February 2016. Pakistan were defending only a paltry 83, but Amir bowled as if he would bowl India out single-handedly.
He claimed the wickets of Rohit, Rahane and Raina in his first 10 balls to reduce India to 8 for 3 before Kohli’s class took the game away from Pakistan.
The quickie from Punjab bowled quite well during the ensuing tours of England and Australia, but his returns were not extraordinary. He was producing impressive cameos, but not the sort of performances a hero is made of. And then came the final of the ICC Champions Trophy- the biggest of stages, against the biggest of opponents.
Probably, destiny had set it up for him as he grabbed the chance to steal the limelight with both hands. His tale of redemption was complete.
Also Read: ICC Champions Trophy 2017: Pakistan and the story that narrates itself once in a lifetime