Inzy Goes Out

The great Pakistani batsman Inzamam-ul-Haq retired from international cricket just a few runs short of becoming the highest Test-scorer in the history of Pakistani cricket.

In his typically modest fashion he downplayed this: "I wanted to break the record but Javed bhai was a much better player than me. Even if I broke it, he has played a huge part in the runs I got."

I will always remember him from the 1992 World Cup, when I saw him for the first time. While Imran Khan and Wasim Akram are the ones most often credited for Pakistan's improbable victory, it was Inzy's fierce 37-ball 60 in the semi-finals, followed by a 35-ball 42 in the finals that laid the winning foundation.

He may have overshadowed during his career by bigger names in the batting world, but there was never a better match-winner (17 of his 25 Test centuries came in wins) on the field, and a classier individual off it.

Hopefully we'll get to see him in that Twenty20 league they are trying to get off the ground in India.

Here is a great little bit from The Spin, Lawrence Booth's excellent weekly cricket email:

"Could anyone have retired from Test cricket in such tragic-comic style as Inzamam-ul-Haq? Needing only six runs in his final innings, against South Africa at Lahore last week, to overtake Javed Miandad as Pakistan's leading runscorer, he was stumped second ball for three, charging out of his crease as if someone had left a bowl of ice-cream in the middle of the pitch. Heck, it was the perfect ending, one last loveable anecdote in a career full of them.

Everyone has their own favourite Inzy story, even if the outright winner is usually the time he waddled like an angry mother hen into the crowd at Toronto with a bat to confront a man who had been calling him a potato. The Spin has always enjoyed tales of his training regime, which tended to involve watching his team-mates sweat it out from the comfort of a giant wicker chair before deigning to have a bat himself, a process which usually lasted about five minutes before he got bored and went off to munch on a biscuit.

But the best story yet emerged recently from the mouth of the former Pakistan opener Aamir Sohail. "We were at a warm-up game in Zimbabwe once," recalls Sohail, "and the fast bowlers were on with the old
ball. I was standing at slip with Inzy next to me. We crouched down as you do when the bowlers were coming in. Four or five balls later, I noticed Inzy was still crouching and, surprised, I asked him if everything was OK. He replied, 'I'm fine, just trying to sleep. The ball is old and reversing so there's hardly a chance there will be any edges to snap up.'"

It's the perfect Inzy anecdote. Idleness, pragmatism, cunning, honesty... and just a touch of Billy Bunter.

Yep, we'll miss him."

Links:

Cricinfo Match Report
Cricinfo Career Appreciation
Cricinfo Test History
Cricinfo Timeline
Cricinfo Player Tributes
The Times Report
The Spin