Afridi’s Secret Diary: Ajmal Band for World Cup

I sewer touching my shampoo and hair conditioner that I'm anger like nobody's business.

If you steel not getting it, I'm mad for ICC who band our Saeed Ajmal for illegal action. And this six months in front of the World Cup. What massage ICC giving here?

I having no doubt this is a conspiracy and they not wanting us to victory. Ajmal is our best chucker spinner. If Pakistan cricket team is a army, he is a loyal shoulder. You band him, you handicraft us. In our country, first ballers are borning every day but chucker spinners we get rearly.

I don't know why they telling Ajmal having illegal action. When Asif played, he had illegal action. After match, he wented to shops to by nasha products. I except that us illegal action. Poor Ajmal has not even money to buy a packet of bidi.

Just I hearing ICC things he throws. It's uncorrect. Ajmal is a good boy. I know some boys once wanted to throw a match. It was just for fun, not money, I telling you. Butt Ajmal refuged. No, only Ajmal refuged. Butt did not. Also because Ajmal was not playing then.

This Ajmal band has effected our World Cup plan. We now needing a institute...or is it substitute? Otherwise, pressure mound on my soldier I loose my beautiful hairs.

Friends, time to shampoo my hair and conditioner then. I'll return back quickly. Also, I see Ajmal is 37 years old. I being so little, I take back all the "boys" in this diary and wish good luck to Ajmal chacha.

End of Shoaib, the enigma

This was probably inevitable. For a guy who toyed with career as if it was his enemy’s, this was bound to happen. And as the Pakistan Cricket Board handed out a five-year ban on the Rawalpindi Express, effective ending his career, you don’t know whether to sympathise with Shoaib Akhtar or hail the ban.

Here you had a youngster who had all the ingredients that could make him the best bowler of his generation, if not an all-time great. Scorching toe-crushers, a well-disguised slower, nasty bouncer and a perfect built to survive the ordeal called fast bowling– an aspiring fast bowler could not have asked for more.

But Shoaib was done in by a self-destructive streak.

He would push aside suggestions by the few well-wishers he had among fellow/former cricketers. Success got to his head at an early age and he could not banish the demon ever. Instead, he nursed it inside and the result was ugly manifestations, one after another.

Pampered by the Tauqir Zia-led PCB to the point of being spoilt, Shoaib steadfastly refused to change. Isolated from jealous teammates who grudged his privileged status in the side, Shoaib became selfish. Challenging the speedgun seemed his sole mission when he started the run up. Poor Bob Woolmer could not convince him to cut short that spectacularly long run-up, even though that often invited slow over-rate for the side.

The fitness regimen he followed was flawed to the end. Shoaib would probably go down in cricket’s history as the guy who was ruined by the growing gym culture that threatens to ruin many a career. Fledgling pacers need to develop muscle, but that does not mean you have to resemble the WWF hulks.

But there you had Shoaib, a torso as heavy as a payloader, gasping for breath in the boundary lines and frantically sniffing from an inhaler after a four-over spell exhausted him.

His macho image, frequent hobnobbing with glamour world – Shoaib gradually became a narcissist. He was more hype than substance. We saw more of those tantrums than his yorkers. He became a problem child that every captain wanted to abandon. And all along, Shoaib still could not see the writing on the wall and mend his ways.

This is not the way one would like to see a player go. Mentors around the cricket globe would cite his example before warning their wards not to go the Shoaib way. Shoaib could easily have been a history-maker. Alas, he preferred to be a history-sheeter.

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