Saeed Anwar made the purists purr with his hundred for Pakistan against England at The Oval in 1996. He was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year the following spring.
Saeed Anwar played 55 Tests for Pakistan, scoring 4,052 runs at 45.52. He also played in 247 ODIs, scoring 8,824 runs at 39.21.
If the most handsome batting of the English summer came from Sachin Tendulkar, the most beautiful innings was surely Saeed Anwar’s century at The Oval. After he had scored 74 and 88 in the opening Test at Lord’s, England conceived the policy of bowling wide of the left-hander’s off stump, to tempt him into impetuosities in the gully area, and it worked on the uneven pitch at Headingley.
At The Oval, Anwar moved his front foot and head well across, then his wrists hovered, hawk-like, over the advancing ball, extending further and further as if they were elastic if the ball was slanted ever more away from him, before the bat flowed into a square-drive to the boundary.
England’s strategy sped him to his highest Test score of 176. The same line in the one-day international series, to a 6-3 field, did not keep him quiet either: in his three innings he scored 151 runs off 159 balls, his timing rising above a pace-less Old Trafford pitch when his equally belligerent partner Aamir Sohail could not get the ball off the patchy square.
More conventional bowling methods at the start of the tour were to little avail: he made 219 not out against Glamorgan on his debut here and two more hundreds in his next three first-class games. Although his experience of cricket in England had been limited to a couple of league games in Bristol in 1992, his predisposition to front-foot play enabled him to finish with 1,224 runs at 68.00 to top the Pakistanis’ first-class tour averages. His brilliance, and the capable young understudy Shadab Kabir, minimised the effects of the wrist injury to Sohail; and on a personal level, he demonstrated, once and for all, that he was not merely a one-day batsman.
His tour captain last summer, Wasim Akram, thought that marriage also had a hand in Anwar’s maturing as a Test cricketer. He was married in March 1996 to a cousin and doctor, Lubna, who had nursed him through the attack of what might have been malaria or typhoid that led him to miss most of 1995. He was cured only just in time for the last World Cup.
It all came together in England last summer, and the only disappointment – other than for England’s bowlers – was that a three-Test series was too short for a full appreciation of Test cricket’s new delight.
