Cricket - Shahid Afridi the entertainer for whom retirement doesn’t count

They say you are a long time retired. And it’s true, with the caveat that if you’re Shahid Afridi it doesn’t count. For Afridi, retirements seem to come and go like buses, if they were only a little more regular. This latest seems to be his seventh. He first quit Test cricket in April 2006 but changed his mind by the end of the month. Later that summer he quit Tests again, until 2010, when he came back as captain for a single match. After which he quit for third time. Then in 2011 he foreswore all international cricket because he was so fed up with the PCB. In 2012 he decided to stop ODI cricket but was persuaded to stay until after the World Cup in 2015, when he did give it up for good. Now he’s giving up T20 internationals too. Possibly.

Afridi says he wants to talk to his friends, family and Imran Khan before he makes his decision. An announcement is expected any moment. So by the time you’ve finished reading this line, he may have made up his mind. But then when you’re done with this one, he may well have changed it again. If he does stick with it, then anyone who missed Afridi’s final gig against Australia can rest assured there will be opportunities to catch him on various domestic circuits. He still hasn’t quit first-class cricket and is certainly planning to play on in T20. He’s due to play a full season for Hampshire in the T20 Blast this summer. He may well make more farewell tours than even Status Quo have managed.

If you did miss Afridi’s final innings against Australia, you’ve still seen it. He made 14 off of seven balls in 11 minutes, a quintessential Afridi innings. Altogether he has played in 98 T20 internationals – a quarter as many again as anyone else. And in a third of them he has made between 10 and 25, always at a rate of more than a run a ball. The only real difference between them all is whether he scored more in sixes or fours. Overall, his strike rate of 150.75 is better than that of any other batsman bar Glenn Maxwell (153.90). And Afridi has played three times as many innings as Maxwell has.

Against Australia, Afridi started with a temperate push to cover. He often begins this way, with a gesture towards playing himself in, as if he wants to make a token acknowledgment of the niceties of batting. Next, he lashed a single down the ground to long-off, so hard the grass seemed to smoke as the ball sped across it. Thinking he now had the measure of Australia’s attack, he walloped the third ball back over the bowler’s head for six. The fourth was a short ball he ducked under, happy to give the bowler his due. The fifth was another, which he threw his bat at, and the ball ricocheted away off the top-edge high into the night sky for a single. The sixth was another huge six, hit from three strides down the pitch. And the seventh was the one that got him, stumped as he charged to try to repeat the previous shot.

Advertisement

So, in only seven balls, Afridi seemed to cycle through all the many stages a batsman might go through in the course of a long innings, from cautious beginnings through canny accumulation to masterful domination and, at last, a fatal mistake. Experienced Afridi-watchers, too, will have passed through a familiar range of emotions. From anticipation to excitement to exhilaration. Then fearful apprehension as that top-edge flew up into the sky, sweet relief as it landed safely in front of the on-rushing fielder. Then foreboding. Because the second six had taken his score into double figures, and more often than not, that means the show will soon be over. Afridi’s sixes sometimes feel like James Thurber’s martinis. One is all right, two are too many, and three are not enough.

Occasionally, Afridi does makes it through the teens and push his score on past 30. He’s done it twice in the 25 innings he’s played in international T20s in the past two years. He made 45 against Sri Lanka at Colombo last August, and 49 against Bangladesh at Kolkata earlier in this tournament. He’s seldom gone on much longer than that. In the decade he’s been playing this version of the game, his best score for Pakistan is only 54. But some of us still hope for more. There’s a word for this: Afridiocy. The foolhardy belief he’s always about to play a match-winning hand. Many Pakistani fans, exasperated by his frequent failures and lackadaisical leadership, have given up on him. Many more haven’t. As he explained in a recent interview with Nagraj Gollapudi: “My real strength is my awaam [public]. My awaam, in every difficult time, has supported me.”

For us neutrals, who have nothing invested in Afridi’s success other than our enjoyment of the match, he remains one of the most entertaining players around. Afridi has a reckless disregard for anything other than his own desire to hit the next ball for six. He has long since abandoned any pretence he might try to improve the way he plays. And is, instead, entirely at peace with the capriciousness of his own talent, as though it’s beyond his own control. “I used to get very frustrated and whenever I went in to bat I was in two minds. Any shot I played, I would do with fear in my heart,” he said in that interview. “With that pressure, I batted for five to seven years. But eventually I took a call and said: ‘If I play, I will play the way I want to, not how anyone else tells me to.’”

Advertisement

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to capture exactly what it is about Afridi’s batting I love so much. Or even the second or third. I suspect it’s do with my being English, and our odd obsession with whether or not our coaches are allowing the players to “express themselves” on the field. As though character is just another part of the skillset, a quality that has to be learned at management seminars and passed on in Powerpoint presentations. Whatever else it is, Afridi’s batting, hare-brained, belligerent, brilliant, is indistinguishably and unmistakeably his own, and it always has been. But even now after another 1,000 words, I’m still not sure I’ve quite got it right. The good thing is, he’ll soon be retiring again, so I’ll likely have another shot before long.