A Surly Shoaib is the Finest Sight in Cricket

No bowler was so spectacular as Shoaib Akhtar, it's just a shame that these days he's more often got a mic in his hand than a ball, writes Andy Bull
The coming of British summer time has just about dragged my spirits out of winter. The county cricket season starts on April 10. And while by the end of it there'll be plenty of reasons to be sick of it, right now I feel nothing but sweet anticipation of long days spent boundary-side in the company of a few sandwich-chomping fellow spectators. It's a kind of pre-emptive reverie. The news wire snap that Shoaib Akhtar had been banned for five years by the PCB sent my mind meandering back to a hot afternoon in September 2005. September 4 in fact, a date I'm precise about only because I looked up the scorecard. That was four days before the start of the final Ashes Test, and while almost every other eye in the country was fixed on the coming Thursday at the Oval, I was sat in the Pavilion stand at New Road. I was being paid to write a report, but other than that there seemed very little reason to be there (the famous bangers'n'mash in a Yorkshire pudding specialty of the cafe aside). It was a List A fixture between two teams - Worcestershire and Gloucestershire - who were both about to be relegated into the second division of the terribly-important tote sport league. Worcestershire had signed Shoaib as an overseas player that season, a decision that the club quickly came to regret. Rightly so, perhaps, given that Shoaib repeatedly failed to turn up for training, often withdrew from matches citing phony injuries and generally gave the impression that playing county cricket was an activity he ranked in importance somewhere between trimming his nails and matching his spare socks into pairs. So they dropped him. Until, an hour before this particular game was about to start, Gareth Batty bent his finger trying to field a ball. Like a lot of hopeless English spinners, Batty seems a haplessly comic figure. His place in the annals of cricket rests largely upon the outstanding feats his own misfortune enabled others to achieve - as anyone who remembers Brian Lara's fine-leg-four to move his score to 384 at Antigua will testify. That day, Batty's pratfall in training led to one of the most memorable afternoons of cricket I've seen. A man short, the club gave Shoaib a call. If he was already pissed off at being dropped, the idea of coming in to work at late notice on the weekend as a replacement for Gareth Batty, of all people, really got to him. Gloucester won the toss and batted first, so Shoaib's funk was still steaming fresh when he got a chance to do something about it. I don't think anyone at that ground was prepared for what he was about unleash. The crowd were lazily assembling as he paced out his run in long, loping strides. He stood, turned, and flicked his fringe out of his eye with his fingers. Then, jutting his chin and staring at the batsman, he rolled up his sleeves past his elbows. "That," intoned a hoary old man sat nearby, "means he's in business today". His first four overs returned five wickets for seven runs. It was the finest spell of fast bowling I've seen in county cricket, perhaps the finest full stop. It was spectacularly ferocious, and glorious to watch. The Gloucestershire batsmen - good county players such as Craig Spearman and Alex Gidman among them - were simply unable to play him. He was in a different class. Only his opposite overseas number, Ramnaresh Sarwan, could get bat on ball. Sitting up in my seat, squinting into the sunshine, I'd see him run in, I'd see his arms describe an arc and the ball leave his hand. And by the time the batsman began his stroke the bails would already be hitting the turf somewhere beyond second slip. He took three wickets in four balls, and went on to record the best limited overs figures (7.2-2-16-6) in Worcestershire's history. It didn't stop the club moaning about what a poor signing he'd been, but it did give their supporters something to remember him by. And that's always been Shoaib, a law unto himself but a bowler with as much dash, panache and power as any who played the game. I can understand why Pakistani fans might be happy he has gone: Geoff Lawson wants to make the side more calmly consistent, and Shoaib's whims and tantrums are hardly conducive to that. But as a neutral, more than anything else, I hope that we haven't seen the last of him. Losing Shane Bond to the Indian Cricket League was bad enough. That Shoaib's refusal to please his Board's administrators has cost us the joy of watching him play is worse still. If only he could make his case for his inclusion with a ball in his hand rather than a microphone.