Abdul Hafeez Kardar - Hero Worship
On November 8, the seemingly indomitable South Africans lifted the Golden Jubilee trophy by comfortably beating Sri Lanka at 'Lahore's Gaddafi Stadium, the venue of the letter's most memorable triumph in cricket.
| Sarfraz Nawaz - Master of reverse swing |
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The first game in the short two-Test series in Australia was played at Melbourne, unusually late, in March. Graham Yallop won the toss and put Pakistan in. An aggressive opening spell from Rodney Hogg had the visitors in trouble early on and they were always struggling; Sarfraz, often a useful performer with the bat, top-scoredwith 35 out of 196. Australia fared even worse against Imran (4 for 26) and Sarfraz, totalling 168 (debutant Day Whatmore 43). Pakistan declared their second innings at 353 for 9. By the close of the fourth day, Australia were 117 for 2 with Andrew Hilditch and Whatmore both out to Sarfraz. Australia needed 265 to win on the final day.
Yallop was out early but Allan Border and Kim Hughes combined for the biggest partnership of the match, putting on 177 for the fourth wicket. The twenty-three year-old Border made what would later come to be seen as a typically dogged six-and-a-quarter-hour century, his first in Tests. The new ball had been taken shortly before tea but Pakistan appeared to be handicapped by Imran suffering from the after-effects of food poisoning. The fourth-wicket pair took the score to 305: 77 needed for victory. Then Sarfraz, cutting his run-up by half and holding the seam upright, struck, bowling Border with a beauty that cut sharply back. Hughes was caught at mid off trying to revive the run-getting;Yallop had been run out: everyone else was either bowled, leg before or caught behind. Mushtaq Mohammad described Pakistan's 77-run victory as a miracle. To say that this was typical of 'Saf' would be misleading because it would suggest that he was mean and calculating. Which he was not. Well, not often; usually he was charming and companionable. But he was a bit unpredictable, not to say contrary: a controversialist. In the middle of the 1977/78 series against England he simply vanished, flying to England in a fit of pique about terms and conditions. Peter Roebuck put it well: deadly serious but incredibly funny. And he was always well aware of his 'rights': hence the appeal. Brodribb conceded that Hilditch was silly to pick the ball up; there are, after all, eleven fielders who can do that. 
 Set 1/2       Sarfraz and Imran were a very considerable pair, both immensely hard-working although Irnran was naturally fitter. Sarfraz was anmong the earliest exponents of reverse swing and he was never shy of explaining how he helped to teach lnmran the proper way to shine a cricket ball. In the mid 1970s, the county were as strong as they have ever been.Their greatest strength was the variety of their bowling - Sarftaz and Bob Cottam, the left-armer John Dye and two genuinely exotic spinners, Bishan Bedi and Mushtaq. In 1975, Sarfraz took 101 first-class wickets at 20.30. Peter Lee of Lancashire was the only other bowler to take a hundred wickets. The following year, although his figures did not look as good, he was more influential. He took 82 wickets at 22.76 - being the fifth-highest wicket taker in the country - and was a genuine match-winner. Northants came second in the Championship and won the Gillette Cup, their first honour. He also scored over 600 championship runs. In 1977, he was fourth in the national averages with 73 wickets at 17.06. He headed the county's bowling averages again in 1979 and in 1980 he was a leading figure in the county's triumph in the Benson & Hedges Cup, taking three for 22 in the quarter-final against Nottinghamshire, 5 for 21 in the semi-final against Middlesex and 3 for 23 in the final against Essex, which Northants won by 6 runs. Sarfraz finished with over 500 wickets for the county. He took 1,005 wickets in all. As suggested above, he was a more than useful batsman too. His forceful 53 at Headingley in 1974 in difficult conditions was the second highest score of an intriguing draw. He took 7 wickets as well. He made invaluable runs -29 and 51 - in both innings of Mushtaq's victory at Port-of-Spain in 1976/77. In his fifty-fifth and final Test, at his home ground of Lahore, against England in 1983/84, he went in at number ten in the first innings and scored 90, putting on 161 for the ninth wicket with Zaheer Abbas and becoming the third Pakistani, after Imran and Intikhab Alam, to achieve the Test match double of a thousand runs and a hundred wickets. In that last series, at the age of thirty-five, he bowled 150 overs in the three Tests. He had a spell in politics and for a while was a special adviser on sport to the Pakistani government. It seems almost like Tony Blair making Wayne Rooney a special adviser on football: don't laugh - it could still happen. He was always a stirrer. As England began preparations for what was always going to be a difficult tour of Pakistan in 1987/88, he put a little fuel on the fire by suggesting that the English umpires Dickie Bird and David Shepherd - sainted figures both - had been a little less than even-handed in their handling of the World Cup semi-final between Australia and Pakistan. Sarfraz's first explanation for Pakistan's defeat was that they had thrown the match, but he changed his mind about this after the captain,Javed Miandad, sued for defamation. Even his relations with Imran became difficult. Ivo Tennant, in his biography of Imran, said that he and Sarfraz were no longer speaking to one another. That was 1994.Then the match-fixing scandal broke in 1995, however, they began exchanging pleasantries. It emerged that Imran had been involved in the decision to sack manager Intikhab Alain and the captain Saleem Malik after the crisis-ridden tour of southern Africa. Sarfraz - ever the nioderator alleged that liiiraii should he stoned to death as a cheat and an adulterer. Jinran responded, alleging that Sarfraz was an inveterate gambler who, when in England, could always be found in Ladbrokes. All good clean fun. On one point, though, the two appeared to be in agreement. There was only one punishment appropriate for someone found guilty of match-fixing: the death penalty. Full name Sarfraz Nawaz Malik Born December 1, 1948, Lahore, Punjab Current age 65 years 222 days Major teams Pakistan, Lahore, Northamptonshire, Pakistan Railways, Punjab, Punjab University, United Bank Limited Batting style Right-hand bat Bowling style Right-arm fast-medium
Batting and fielding averages
By Bill Ricquier from "The Pakistani Masters" Source: WikiPedia
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A brief survey of the career of the mercurial fast-medium bowler Sarfraz Nawaz could do worse than concentrate on his performances on Pakistan's tour of Australia in 1978/79.